ENVIRONMENTAL THEATER

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OTHER TITlES FROM THE ApPLAUSE ACTING SERIES:

THE ApPLAUSE ACTING SERIES

ON SINGING ON STAGE

David Craig THE END OF ACTlNG: A RADICAL VIEW

Richad Homby

ENVIRONMENTAL THEATER

ACTING IN FILM

(book & videocassette) Michael Caine DIRECTING THE ACTION

Charles Morowitz MICHAEL CHEKHOV: ON THEATRE AND THE ART OF ACTING

(autiotapes) THE MONOLOGUE WORKSHOP

An Expanded New Edition including "Six Axioms Fo! Environmental Theater"

lack Poggi RECYCLING SHAKESPEARE

Charles Morowitz SHAKESCENES: SHAKESPEARE FOR Two

lohn Russell Brown SPEAK WITH DISTlNCTlON

Edith Skinner STANISLAVSKI REVEALED

Sonia Moore

Richard Schechner

THE STANISLAVSKY TECHNIQUE: RUSSIA

MelGordon THE CRAFTSMEN OF DIONYSUS

Jerome Rockwood THE ACTOR AND THE TEXT

Cicely Barry ONE ON ONE: BEST MONOLOGUES FOR THE NINITIES

lack Temchin (ed.) SHAKESPEARE'S Pu YS IN PERFORMANCE

lohn Russell Brown

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ZHdK- MIZ (Zürich)

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An Applause Original Environmental Theater By Richard Schechner Copyright © 1973, 1994 Richard Schechner

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanicaI, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast. Special emphasis is placed on photocopying of any part of this text for classroo

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use. The publish-

er hereby cautions that all breaches of copyright will be prosecuted.

Contents

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schechner, Richard, 1934Environmental theater I Richard Schechner. --New, expanded ed. p. cm. - (The Applause acting series) . Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 1-55783-178-5 L ftrformance Group. 2. Theater-Rychological aspects.

1. Title. U. Series. PN2297.P4S3 792-dc20

94-4199

1994

CIP

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Applause books are available through your local bookstore, or you mayorder at www.applausepub.com or call Music Dispatch at 800-637-2852

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Introduction YSixAxioms I(Space )l. Participation Nakedness Performer Shaman Therapy Playwright Groups Director Bibliography Index

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40 87 125 174 193 227 243 285 321 331

SIX AXIOMS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL THEATER 1967, revised 1987

1: THE THEATRICAL EVENT IS A SET OF RELATED TRANSACTIONS The theatrical event includes audience, performers, scenario or dramatic text (in most cases), performance text, sensory stimuli, architectural enclosure or some kind of spatial demarcation, production equipment, technicians, and house personnel (when used). It ranges from non-matrixed performances I to orthodox mainstream theater, from chance events and intermedia to "the production of plays." A continuum of theatrical events blends one form into the next: "Impure," life public events, +----+ intermedia ~ environmental demonstrations ._ happenings theater

"Pure," art

+----+ orthodox theater

It is because I wish to include this entire range in my definition of theater that traditional distinctions between art and life no longer apply. All along the continuum there are overlaps; and within it-say between an orthodox production of Hamlet and the October 1966 March on the Pentagon or Allan Kaprow's Self-Service'--there are contradictions. Aesthetics is built on systems of interaction and transformation, on the ability of coherent wholes to include contradictory parts. In the words of New York city planner Richard Weinstein, "competing independent systems withiri the same aesthetic frame." Kaprow might even take a more radical position, doing away altogether with the frame (see his "The R~al Experiment," 1983), or accepting a variety of frames depending on the perspectives of the performers and spectators. Surely the frames may change during a single performance, transforming an event into something unlike what it started out being. The end of Iphegeni(l Transjormed (1966) at the Firehouse Theatre had Euripides' dea ex machina lowered onto stage bringing with her four -

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cases of beer. The marriage ceremony that concludes lphegenia at Aulis was followed by acelebration that inc1uded the entire audiencethe party lasted several hours. Years later, in his production of The Trojan Women, Suzuki Tadashi, the Japanese director of experimental theater, ended the play with an onstage actors-only supper of Big Macs. In my 1973 production with The Performance Group of Brecht' s Mother Courage, scene 3-the death of Swiss Cheese-was followed immediately by a supper served to the spectators. The theatrical event is a complex social interweave, a network of expectations and obligations.3 The exchange of stimuli-either sensory or cognitive or both-is the root of theater. What it is that separates theater from more ordinary exchanges-say a simple conversation or a party-is difficult to pinpoint formally. One might say that theater is more regulated, following a script or a scenario; that it has been rehearsed. Kirby would probably argue that theater presents the self in a more defined way than usual social encounters. Grotowski has said that the theater is a meeting place between a traditional text and a troupe of performers. I didn't do Wyspianski's Akropolis, I met it. [... ] One structures the montage so that this confrontation can take place. We eliminate those parts of the text which have no importance for US, those parts with which we can neither agree nor disagree. [... ] We did not want to write a new play, we wished to confront ourselves (l968a: 44).

Indeed, confrontation is what makes current American political activity theatrical. To meet BuH Connor's dogs in Birmingham or LBJ's troops at the Pentagon is more than a showdown in the Wild West tradition. In the movies, everything would be settled by the showdown. In the political demonstrations, contrasts are heightened, nothing resolved. A long series of confrontations is necessary to actuate change. The streets of Birmingham and the steps of the Pentagon are visible boundaries, special places of special turbulence, where sharply opposed styles are acted out by both sides. At the Pentagon, stiff ranks and files of troops confronted snake-dancing protesters; in Birmingham hand-holding civil rights activists marched peaceably into the snarling dogs and twisting fire-hoses barely held under control by the police. Grotowski's personal confrontation is converted into a social confrontation. Out of such situations, slowly and unevenly, guerrilla and street theater emerge, just as out of the confrontation between medieval ceremony and Renaissance tumult emerged the Elizabethan theater. John Cage has offered an inc1usive definition of theater:

Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1975), scene three. Courage says she doesn't know Swiss Cheese who is under arrest. Note how the spectators are scattered around The Performing Garage environment, designed by James Clayburgh. (Richard Schechner)

Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her . Children (1975), scene three, in The Performing Garage. As Courage watches, Swiss Cheese is hoisted aloft, where he will remain until executed. (Richard Schechner)

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Environmental Theater I would simply say that theater is something which engages both the eye and the ear. The two public senses are seeing and hearing; the senses of taste, touch, and odor are more proper to intimate, nonpublic, situations. The reason I want to make my definition of theater that simple is so that one could view everyday life itself as theater. [... ] I think of theater as an occasion involving any number of people, but notjust one (1965: 50-51).

Cage's definition is probably too restrictive. Performance artists have made pieces involving the "intimate senses." And there are performances involving onIy one person. In the New Orleans Group's 1967 production of Eugene Ionesco's Victims 0/ Duty, three "private" senses were stimulated. During a seduction scene perfume was released in the roam; frequently the performers communicated to the spectators by means of touch. At the very end of the show, chunks of bread were forcefully administered to the audience by the performers, expanding the final cruel gesture of Ionesco's pIay. Of course, the Bread and Puppet Theatre concludes all its performances with the sharing of home-baked bread. In situations where descriptive definitions are so open as to be inoperati ve as excluding criteria, one must seek relational definitions. Taking a relational view makes it possible to understand theater as something more inciusive than the staging of literature, acting, and directing. It is possible to integrate into a single system works as diverse as Self-Service and Tyrone Guthrie's Oresteia. Goffman's assertions regarding social organization are broader even than Cage' s and go right to the heart of the theatrical event: [... ] any [... ] element of sociallife [...] exhibits sanctioned orderliness arising from obligations fulfilled and expectations realized (1961: 19).

Briefly, a social order may be defined as the consequence of any set of moral norms [roles] that regulate the. way in which persons pursue objectives (1963: 8). The nature of the expectation-obligation network and specific sets of rules vary widely depending on the particular performance. Returning to the continuum, at the left end are loosely organized street events-the 1966 March on the Pentagon, activities of the Amsterdam and New York Provos 4; toward that end of the continuum are Kaprow's kind of happenings. In the center of the continuum are highly organized intermedia events-some of Kirby's and Robert

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Whitman's work, and "conventional" environmental theater such as the NOG's Victims 0/ Duty or Richard Brown's 1967 production of The Investigation at Wayne State University. At the far right of the continuum is the orthodox staging of dramatic texts. The analysis of dramatic texts is possihle only from the middle of the continuum to the right end; performance analysis is possible along the entire range. What related transactions Comprise the theatrical event? There are three primary ones: , Among performers. Among members of the audience. Between performers and audience. The first begins during rehearsals and continues through all performances. In Stanislavski-oriented training the heaviest emphasis is given to performer-performer transactions. They are, in fact, identified with "the play." The theory is that if the interactions among the performers are perfected-even to the exclusion of the audience from the performers' attention both during rehearsals, which are closed, and during production when the audience is "hidden" on the other side of the proscenium arch-the production will be artistically successful.- When this method works the spectators feel they are watching through a fourth wall, "visitors to the Prozorov household," as Stanislavski put it.But there are many examples showing that this method rarely works. It is simply not enough for the performers to be a self-enclosed ensemble. The second transaction-among members of the audience-is usually overlooked. The decorum of orthodox theater-going is such that the audience obeys strict rules of behavior. They arrive more or ]ess on time, they do not leave their seats except for intermission or at the end of the show, they displayapproval or disapproval within wellregulated patterns of applause, silence, laughter, tears, and so on. In events on the far left of the performance continuum, it is difficult to distinguish spectators from performers. A street demonstration or sit-in is made up of shifting groups of performers and spectators. And in confrontations hetween demonstrators and police both groups fill both roles alternatelyand, frequently, simultaneously. A particularly rich example of this occurred during the March on the Pentagon. The demonstrators had broken through the military lines and were sitting-in in the Pentagon parking lot. Those in the front lines sat against the row of troops and frequent small actions-nudging, exchange of conversation-turned. these front lines into foca) points. Every halfhour or so, hoth the'tront-line troops and front-li ne demonstrators were

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relieved of their posts. Demonstrators who were watching the action became part of it; the same for the troops. Elements of the Pentagon leadership stood on the steps in front of the building's main entrance watching the procedure. For someone at horne, the entire confrontation was a performance and everyone-from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara at his window and the ad-hoc demonstration leaders with their bullhorns down to individual soldiers and pro testers-was acting according to role. Very Iittle hard work has been done researching the behavior of audiences and the possible exchange of roles between audience rnembers and performers. 5 Unlike the performers, the spectators attend theater unrehearsed; they bring to the theater adherence to decorum learned previously but nevertheless scrupulously applied now. Usually the audience is an impromptu group, meeting at the time/place of the performance but ne ver again meeting as a defined group. Thus uncohesive and unprepared, they are difficult to collectivize and mobilize but, once mobilized, even more difficult to control. The third primary transaction-between performers and spectators-is a traditional o·ne. An action onstage evokes an empathetic reaction in the audience which is not an imitation but a harmonie variation. Thus sadness on stage may evoke tears in the audience or put into play personal associations which, on the surface, seem unrelated to sadness. Conversely, as any performer will eagerly testify, audiences "good" and "bad" affect the performance. Good and bad are sliding terms depending the kind of performance and who is making the value judgment. An active, boisterous audience may be good for farce but bad for serious plays. The "best" audiences are those who res pond harmonically up to but not beyond the point where the performers become distracted. Orthodox theater in the West uses a thin fraction of the enormous range of audience-performer interactions. Other cultures are much more adventurous in this regard. The three primary interactions are supplemented by four secondary ones: Among production elements. Between production elements and performers. Between production elements and spectators. Between the total production and the space(s) where it takes place. These are secondary now, but they could become primary.6 By production elements I mean scenery, costumes, lighting, sound, makeup, and so on. With the full-scale use of film, TV, taped sound, projected still images and the powerful impact of "style"7-production

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elements need no longer "support" a performance. These elements are more important than the performers. The Polyvision and Diapolyecran rooms at the Czech Pavilion at Montreal's Expo '67 introduced new kinds of film and still-image environments that can serve either as background for performers or as independent performing elements. 8 Briefly the Poly vision was a total conversion of a medium-size, rather high ceilinged room into a film and slide environment. Mirrors, moving cubes and prisms, projections both from outside the space and from within the cubes, images which seemed to move through space as weIl as cover the walls, ceilings, and floors all built the feeling of a fuH space of great pictorial flexibility. The- nine-minute presentation, programmed on a ten-track computer tape used eleven film projectors and twenty-eight slide projectors. The material itself was banal-an account of Czech industry. But of course more "artistic" or "meaningful" material could be used in the system. No live performers participated. ' The Diapolyecran was not actuaBy an environment; it was restricted to one wall and the audience sat on the floor watching the fourteenminute show. Only slide projectors were used. According to the "Brief Description": The Diapolyeeran fs teehnical equipment which enables a simultaneous projection of slides on a mosaic projeetion screen consisting of 112 projeetion surfaees. The surfaces are projected on from behind and they may be shifted singly, in groups, or all at onee. This enables one to obtain with still images pictures of motion, and the picture groups thus obtained are best charaeterized as "mosaic projection." Each of the 1i 2 slide projectors was mounted on a steel frame that had three positions: back, middle, forward. The images could be thrust out toward the audience or moved back from it. The mosaic was achieved by complex programming-there were 5.5 million bits of information memorized on tape; 19,600 impulses were emitted per second. By the mid-70s this or similar techniques had become commonplace in museums, business, music TV, and rock concerts. The theater, however, restricted its electronic research to computerizing lighting controls (still using old-fashioned fresnel and ellipsoidal instruments). Little attempt has been made to tap the resources suggested by the Czechs. B~t the key to making technic~) elements part of the creative process is not simply to apply die latest research to theatrical productions. The technicians themselves must become an active part of

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the performance. This does not necessarily mean the use of more sophisticated equipment, but rather the more sophisticated use of the human beings who run whatever equipment is available. The technicians' role is not limited to perfecting during rehearsals the use of their machines. During all phases of workshop and rehearsals the technicians should participate. And during performances the technicians should be as free to improvise as the performers, modulating the uses of their equipment night-to-night. Light boards locked into pre-sets do not foster the kind of experimentation I'm talking about. The experience of discos is instructive. The rhythm and content of some light-shows are modulated to accompany and sometimes lead or dominate the activity of the spectator-dancers. During many intermedia performances, the technicians are free to chose where they will project images, how they will organize sound contexts. There is nothing sacred about setting technical elements. If human performance is variable (as it most certainly is), then a unified whole-if one is looking for that-will be better assured by a nightly variation of technical means. Thus, possibilities exist for "performing technicians" whose language is the film-strip or the electronic sound, and whose range of action includes significant variations in where and what is to be done. The same goes for other technical elements. The separation between performers and technicians is erodable because the new accompany can be used not only to completely program all the material (as at the Czech PaviIion) but also to permit the nearly total flexibiIity of bits that can be organized on the spot, during the performance. The performing group is expanding to include technicians as weil as ac tors and dancers. Once this is granted, the creative technician will demand fuller participation in performances and in the workshops and rehearsals that generate performances. At many times during a performance actors and dancers will support the technician, whose activated equipment will be "center stage." A wide-ranging mix is possible. where the complexity of images and sounds-with or without the participation of "unarmed" performers-is all but endless. To achieve this mix of technical and live performers nothing less than the whole space is needed. The kind of work I'm talklng about can't happen if one territory belongs to the audience and another to the performers. The bifurcation of space must be ended. The final exchange between performers and audience is the exchange of space, spectators as scene-makers as weil as scene-watchers. This will not result in chaos: rules are not done away with, they are simply changed.

The Director talks to Marilyn in David Gaard's The Marilyn Projecl (l975), in the upstairs studio space of The Perfonning Garage. Note in the background the exact scene duplicated.

The final scene of David Gaard' s The Marilyn Projecl (1975), in the upstairs studio space of The Perfonning Garage. Two men take the famous "calendar girl" pose of Marilyn Monroe as Marilyn photographs them with a polaroid camera.

xxviii Environmenml Theater 2: ALL THE SPACE IS USEO FOR THE PERFORMANCE From the Greeks to the present a "specialplace" within the theater, the stage, has been marked off for the performance. Even in the metlieval theater which moved from place to place on wagons the performers generally stayed on the wagons and ~he spectators. in t~e streets. Most classical Asian theater agrees wlth the West 10 thls convention. And even village folk-plays are acted out in marked-off areas established for the performance, removed when the show is over. To find exarnples of the continuous systematic exchange of space between performers and spectators we must look into ethnographic reports of rituals. There, two circumstances deserve attention. First, the perforrning group is sometimes the entire population of a vill.a~e: Or, perhaps, adefinite subset of the populatIon such as adult, mltIated males. In these cases frequently the uninitiated-women and children-are not permitted to watch; either the uninitiated are kept away or the performances take place in secluded areas. ~econdly, these performances are not isolated "shows" but part of ongomg cycles that may extended for months or longer (see chapter 5). Of cou!se, such rituals are entertainments, and prized as such by the people domg them, even as they are something else too. The ritual performances are an integral part of community life , knitted into the ecology of the society-for exarnple, the Hevehe cycle of t.he Orokolo of ~ap~a .New Guinea which recapitulates the life expenences of each mdlvldual performer. 10 . " Ouring these kinds of performances, the vIllage, or places near It, IS co-opted for the performance. But the performance does not stand still. It ranges over a defined territory. If there are spectator~ th~y foll?w th~ performance, yielding to it when it approaches, press lOg 10 on It as It recedes. Dance and Trance in BaU (1938) filmed by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson shows this spatial give-and-take ~s weIl as .the fuH use of a spatial domain that continuously modulates ItS boundarles. The dancers are highly organized in their movements. But for parts of the performance they and other performers do not feel called on .to stay in one spot. Children playing demons race around th~ ~Ill~~~; entranced followers of the lion Barong chase Rangda (the wltch 10 Mead's narration) and, as she turns, flee from her. The performance moves in and out of the temple and all across the open areas at the center of the village. The space of the performance is ~efined organically by the action. Specta~ors watc.h fr~m a var~ety of perspectives, some paying close attention, some Ignonng the gom.gs-~n (see chapter 7). Unlike orthodox Western theater where the a~tIon IS trirnrned to a fixed space, this Balinese dance-theater creates ItS own

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space as it is being performed. That is not to say that the performers can go anywhere. By the time Mead and Bateson filmed, the RangdaBarong dance had developed its own mise-en-scene. Once fixed seating and the automatic bifurcation of space are no Ion ger preset, entirely new relationships are possible. Body contact can occur between performers and spectators; voice levels and acting intensities can be varied widely; a sense of shared experience can be engendered. Most important, each scene can create its own space, either contracting to a central or a remote area or expanding to fill all --available space. The action "breathes" anfl the audience itself becomes a major scenic element. Ouring NOG' s Victims 0/ Duty we found that the audience pressed in during intense scenes and moved away when the action became broad or violent; usually they willingly gave way to the performers ll and reoccupied areas after the action passed through. Ouring the final scene, Nicolas chased the Oetective all around the periphery of the large room that was both stage and house, stumbling over spectators, searching in the audience for his victim. Nicolas' obstacles were real-the living bodies of the spectators-and the scene ended when he caught and killed the Oetective. Had someone in the audience chosen to shelter and protect the Oetective an unpredictable complication would have been added, but one that could've been dealt with. At several points in the performance, a member of the audience did not want to give up a place where an action was staged. The performers in character dealt with these people, sometimes forcibly moving them out of the area. 12 These extra tensions may not seem to be a legitimate part of the performance. Surely they are not part of "the play." But the exchange of place implies possibilities of conflicts over space; such conflicts have to be dealt with in terms of the performance. They can be turned to advantage if one believes that the interaction between performers and spectators is areal and valuable one. In many intermedia performances and happenings spectators actively participate. Often the entire space is perforrning space-no one is "just watching." The exchange of space between performers and spectators, and the exploration of the total space by both groups, has not been introduced into our theater by ethnographers turned directors. The model influencing theater is closer to horne: the streets. Everyday life is marked by movement and the exchange of space. Street demonstrations are a special form of street life involving keen theatrical sense. A march for civilliberties or against the Vietnam War is a performance using the streets as. stages and playing to spectators both on the spot and watching at horne on TV or reading about it in the newspapers. People march with or without permits. Having a permit means that the

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marchers are obeying one set of conventions, to demonstrate without a permit defines the event as guerrilla theater. In either case, the marchor is it the parade?-is defined by roles of the genre; as one set of roles are obeyed another set may be broken. Thisever-increasing use of outdoor public space for rehearsed activities-ranging from demonstrations to street entertainers-is having an impact on indoor theater. 3. THE THEATRICAL EVENT CAN TAKE PLACE EITHER IN A TOTALL Y TRANSFORMED SPACE OR IN "FOUND SPACE" Theatrically, environment can be understood in two different ways. First, there is what one can do with and in aspace. Secondly, there is the acceptance of a given space. In the first case one creates an environment by transforming aspace; in the second case, one negotiates with an environment, engaging in a scenic dialog with a space. 13 In the created environment the performance in some sense engineers the arrangement and behavior of the spectators; in a negotiated environment a more fluid situation leads sometimes to the performance being controlled by the spectators. In the orthodox theater, scenery is segregated; it exists only in that part of the space where the performance is played. The construction of scenery is guided by sight-lines; even when "the theater" is exposedbare walls of the building, curtains removed-as in some Brechtian scenography-the equipment is looked at as an indication that "this is a theater your are seeing, our workplace"; the pi ace where the spectators are is the viewing place, the house. In short, mainstream attitudes toward scenography is naive and compromised. In environmental theater, if scenery is used at all, it is used all the way, to the limits of its possibilities. There is no bifurcation of space, no segregation of scenery. If equipment is exposed it is there because it must be there, even if it is in the way. The sources of this extreme position are not easy specify,1 4 The Bauhaus 15 group was not really interested in ordinary scenery. Members of the Bauhaus wanted to build new organic spaces where the action surrounded the spectators or where the action could move freely through the space. Their scenic program was elose to Artaud's. Most of the Bauhaus projects were never buHt. But persons wishing to make theater in the environmental tradition learned from the Bauhaus of new audience-performer relationships. Although not a member of the Bauhaus, Frederick Kiesler (18961966) shared many oftheir ideas. Between 1916 and 1924 he designed,

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but never built, the Endless Theatre, seating 100,000 people. Kiesler foresaw new functions for theater: The elements of the new dramatic style are still to be worked out. They are not yet classified. Drama, poetry, and seenic fo~m~tion have no natural milieu. Publie, space, and players are artIfielally assembled. The new aesthetie has not yet attained a unity .of expression. Communication lasts two hours; the pauses are the SOClal event. We have no eontemporary theater. No agitators' theater, no tribunal, no force whieh does not merely eomment on Iife, but shapes it (1932). These words were written in 1932. In 1930, Kiesler described his Endless Theatre: The whole structure is encased in double shells of steel and opaque welded glass. The stage is an endless spiral: The various levels are eonneeted' with elevators and platforms. Seattng platforms, stage and elevator platforms are suspended and spanned above eaeh other in space. The strueture is an elastie building system of eables and platforms developed from bridge building. The drama ean expand and develop freely in space.t 6 ,

With some modification, Kiesler could be describing that great environmental theater of middle American consumerism, the shopping mall: vast enelosed spaces where people meet, play, eat, see various organized entertainments, peer through st~re windows and. open doors as if each were a small proscenium, entenng whatever parucular space entices them. The object of all this desire certainly revolves. around buying but is not limited to buying. It also in~ludes nume!~us ntuals of strolling, browsing, mixing, displaying, greetmg, and festlvl~Y. From the Bauhaus and people like Kiesler, the envlron~ental theater learned to reject the orthodox use of space and to seek In the events to be performed organic and ?ynam~c defi~itions of spac~. Naturally, such ideas are incompatIble wlth maInstream scemc practice. . 1 Kaprow suggests an altogether different source of enVlronmenta theater: With the breakdown of the classical harmonies following the introduetion of "irrational" or nonharmonic juxtapositions, the Cubists tacitly opened the path to infinity. Once. foreign matter was introdueed into the picture in the form of paper, It was only a matter of time before everything else foreign to paint and canvas. wo~ld. be allowed to get into the ereative aet, including real spaee. SI.m~lifytng the history of the enduing evolution into a flashback, thls IS what

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happened: the pieces of paper curled up off the canvas, were removed from the surface to exist on their own, became more solid as they grew into other materials and, reaching out further into the room, finally filled it entirely. Suddenly there were jungles, crowded streets, littered alleys, dream spaces of science fiction, rooms of madness, and junk-filled attics of the mind.

Six Axioms xxxiii Duty there were "ridges" and "vaHeys" of carpeted pl~tforms. F?r those who sat in the valleys vision beyond was difficuJt. Elther they dld not see an the action or they stood or they moved. Some of the action took plays in the valleys, and then only spectators very elose to the action could see it.

Inasmuch as people visiting such Environments are moving, colored shapes too, and were counted "in," mechanically moving parts could be added, and parts of the created surroundings could then be rearranged like funÜture at the artist's and visitors' discretion. And, 10gical1y, since the visitor could and did speak, sound and speech, mechanical and recorded, were also SOon to be in order. Odors fol1owed (1960: 165-66).17

Many intermedia pieces are environmental. OnJy recently have happeners "discovered" the proscenium stage; a paradoxicaJ cross-over is starting in which the theater is becoming more environmental whiJe happenings and intennedia (and Jater Performance Art) are becoming more orthodox scenicaUy. Kaprow says that his own route to happenings (a usage he coined) was through "action coHage"-not the making of pictures but the creation of a pictorial event. In his 1952 essay, "The American Action Painters," Harold Rosenberg described what'it means to "get inside the canvas":

overp~inted

[.. ·1 the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as aspace in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or "express" an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event (1965: 25).18 It is only a smaU step from action painting and coUage to intermedia and happenings and from there to environmental theater. My own interest in environmental theater developed from my work in intermedia. My partners in the New Orleans Group-painter FrankJin Adams and composer PauJ Epstein-followed the same path. Our first definition of environmental theater was "the application of intennedia techniques to the staging of scripted dramas." A painter's and a composer's aesthetics were melded with that of a theater person's. Traditional biases-theatrical, painterly, musical-fell by the wayside. We were not interested in sightlines or in focusing people's attention onto this or that restricted area. The audience entered a room in which alt the space was "designed," in which the environment was an organic transformation of one space-the raw rooms in which we put our perfonnances-into another, the finished environments. In Victims 0/

For Victims a large room, about a 75' x 75' space, at New Orleans' Le Petit Theatre de Vieux Carre was transfonned into the Chouberts' living-room. But it was not a living-room in the ordinary sense. Not aU the elements had a elear or usual function. It was, rather, the "idea of a living-room most useful to trus production of Victims 0/ Duty." In one corner, chairs spiraled to the ceiling; at another pI ace there ~as a psychoanalyst' s couch; on ~ high isolated platfo~ a wooden chaJr ~at under a bright overhead hght; a sm all proscemum stage was buJlt against one wall for the play-within-t?e-play; trap-doors al~owed the perfonners to play underneath the· audlence; ~ trapeze permJtte? them to play overhead; certain scenes took place In the street outsIde the theater or in other rooms adjoining or over the theater-not all of these scenes couId be seen by spectators; stairways led to nowhere; technical equipment was plainly visible, mounted on platforms against two walls' the walls themselves were covered with flats and lightly so that scenes. from previous produ:tions faintly showed through; on these same :w~l1s graffItI was pal.n~ed: quotations from Victims 0/ Duty. The scemc I~~a was ~o ~ender vIsI,~le Ionesco's formulation that the play was a naturahstlc drama, a parody of theater, and a surreaIistic-psychedeIic-psychoanalytic_ detective story. . . We did not foreplan the set. The directors, perfonners, techmclans, and production crews had been working for about a month in the space where the play was to be perfonned. We had, by the time we moved into the space at Le Petit, been rehearsing for four months. One Saturday afternoon we decided to build the environment. We.lugged whatever flats, platforms, stairways, and carpets we could fInd and worked for ten hours straight. Out of that scenic improvisation came the environment. Very few changes were made during the ensu~ng weeks of rehearsal. The changes that we did make amounted to tunIng up the environment that had been brewing for months but which came into concrete existence during one day. I do not want to make out of this experience a general principle. But I would observe that the elose work on the production by more than twenty people led to a feit knowledge-of what the environment should be. By not planning at all, by working, we understood very weil what was n~eded. . " The very opposite of such a total transfonnation of space IS found space." The principles here are very simple: (1) the given elements of a

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Six Axioms xxxv

A view of the circular theatre, designed by Jim Clayburgh, erected inside The Performing Garage for Seneca's Oedipus (1977). The playing space is filled with tons of earth to the depth of three feet. (Jim Clayburgh) space-its architecture, textural qualities, acoustics, and so on-are to be explored and used, not disguised; (2) the random ordering of space or spaces is valid; (3) the function of scenery, if it is used at all, is to understand, not disguise or transform, the space; (4) the spectators may suddenly and unexpectedly create new spatial possibilities. Most found space is found outdoors or in public buildings that can't be transformed. 19 Here, the challenge is to acknowledge the environment at hand and cope with it creatively. The American prototype for this kind of performance is the protest march or demonstration-for civil rights, women's rights, anti-war, labor, special interest groups, etc. The politics of these marches and confrontations have been discussed elsewhere. Their aesthetics deserves more than passing attention. Take the black freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s, for example. The streets were dangerous for black people, the highways were not free, and local and state governments inhospitable. The sit-ins explored small indoor spaces; the freedom rides had cIaimed the interior of buses as they passed through the interstate countryside. But the ultimate gesture was the march of thousands in the streets and across miles of highway. The

land was procIaimed open, and if there are those who disagree let them make themselves known. The aesthetic fallout of that grand gesture was that the streets were no longer places used only to get from here to there. They were public arenas, testing grounds, theaters over which morality plays were acted out. Many demonstrations against the Vietnam War modeled themselves on the civil rights marches. The American-Roman facade of the Pentagon was the proper backdrop for a confrontation between antiwar youth and the troops deployed/displayed by the military-industrial complex. Draft centers and campuses were other natural focal points. What happened at these places is not properly described as political action only. Ceremonies were being performed, morality plays enacted not only for the benefit of the thousands directly involved but for many more people watching on TV. Adapting a phrase from Goffman, these were the places where parts of the public acted out their reality in the expectation thatother parts of the public would attend the drama. One step more conventionally theatrical than the street demonstration or march is guerrilla theater. I helped plan and direct a series of events called Guerrilla Warfare which was staged at twentythree locations throughout New York City on 28 October 1967.20 Two of the twenty-three performances were worth recounting here. One was the 2 p.m. performance at the Main Recruiting Center in Times Square and the other the 6 p.m. performance at the Port Authority Bus Terminal at Eighth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. The Recruiting Center is a place where demonstrations occurred frequently. The police were familiar with the routine. However, our anti-war play attracted a large hostile crowd who cIosed in on the performers, not threateningly, but aggressively ~ Some people shouted, many mumbled their disapproval. Because the play was intentionally ambivalent-the "plot" was the public execution of a Vietcong: a super-super patriot might think we were for the war-several teenage kids thought we were American Nazis and from that point of view began to question their own support of the war. The performance went swiftly, some of the dialog was lost in the open air. The performers were not comfortable. We found that the narrow tri angular sidewalk, surrounded on all sides by the noise and rush of automotive traffic, and further abbreviated by the pressing crowd. added up to a performance that was brief and staccato. The opposite happened at the Port Authority. Here, the large, vaulting interior space was suited for sound. We began the performance with performers scattered in space who hummed and then sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." Responding to a sight cue, the performers converged on a central area singing louder as they got

· xxxvi Environmental Theater

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Six Axioms xxxvii

closer together. In the TenninaI the swelling anthem seemed to come i from everywhere. Because the commuter crowds were not expecting a ~ perfonnance, a*Irst they didn't seem to believe one was taking pI ace ( A West Point det walked through the performance, paused, ami walked away ~nI to return sho~ly, scratch his head, and stay. Finally, when he reahzed, what was bemg said, he walked off in disgust. A f Iarge crowd gathered; they were curious rather than hostile· their remarks were made quietly, questioning each other about wh~t was i ?oing on. Standing as we were in front of the Greyhound ticket booths, l Just next to theescalators, and alongside a display Ford car, the , perfonnance took on astrange surreality without becoming esoteric or arty. The police were not expecting a perfonnance and acted confused. finall.y they stopped the show seconds away from compietion. Mor~ than m the other Iocations, the Tenninal perfonnance of Kill Vietcong was direct and meaningfuI. Here, where people passed through on the way. to somewhere else, in the bland but massive institutional t t archltecture our culture specializes in, was the place where symbolic I confrontation of values could be clearly demonstrated. I It is possible to combine the principles of transfonned and found space. ~ve~ space has its own given character. This particularity ought to be hved-m, ~elt, a?d respected. An environmental theater design should not. be bhndly Imposed on a site. Also it is possible sometimes to make Just a few modifications to a found space so that a performance may more effectively "take pi ace" there. Once a performance "takes shape" in aspace, either transformed or found, spectators correspondingly take their places. Adefinite reciprocity ?cc.urs: Frequently, because there is no fixed seating and little mdicatIOn of how ~hey should receive the performance, spectators arrange themselves m unexpected patterns; and during the perfonnance these patterns change, "breathing" with the action just as the performers do. ~udiences can make even the most cunningly transfonned space Into found space. In environmental theater it is not ?dvisable to block all the stage action with same rigidity as can be done m orthodox. theaters. The actions develop more as in a sports match, where certam rules govern how the physical action unfolds as moves by one person or group opens opportunities for responses. Perfornlers nee~ to take advantage of the audience's mobility, considering it a flexIble part of the perfonnance environment.

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4. FOCUS IS FLEXIBLE AND VARIABLE

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.Single-focus is the trademark of orthodox theater. Even when actIOns are simultaneous and spread across a large stage, such as at the

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2DD-foot proscenium of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the audience is looking in one direction. A single glance or a simple scan can take in all the action, even the most panoramic. And within these panoramic scenes, there are centers of attention, usually a single focal point around which everything else is organized. Correspondingly, there is a "best place"·from wh ich to observe the stage. Traditionally, the king's seat offered the proper vantage; the further one was from this place, the worse the viewing. Environmental theater does not eliminate these practices, they are usefuI. But added to it are two other kinds of focus, or lack of focus. In multi-focus, more than one event-several of the same kind. or mixed-media-happens simultaneously, distributed throughout the space. Each independent event competes with the other for the audience's attention. The space is organized so that no spectator can see everything. Spectators move or refocus their attention or select. Some of the qualities not only of multi-compartmented happenings but also of street-markets, side-shows, and amusement parks are employed. I mean more than the three-ring circus. In multi-focus, events happen behind, above, below, around, as weil as in front of the spectator. The spectator is surrounded by a variety of sights and sounds. However, it is not necessary that the density of events be "thick." Multi-focus and sensory overload are not equivalent terms though at times they are coincident. Sparse, scattered, low-key and diverse events may be offered simultaneously. Sensory overload leads to a feeling of a small space exploding because it is so full. Sparse events evoke the feeling of space that is large, barely populated, with most of its volume still unexplored. The range of multi-focus extends from one extreme to the other including all intermediate points. A perfonnance using multi-focus will not reach every spectator in the same way. There is no king's seato Reactions may be affectively and cognitively incompatible with one another because one spectator puts events together in a different way, or sees different events, than a person sitting e10se by or at a distance. In multi-focus, the director's role is not to organize a single coherent "statement." Coherence is left to the spectators to assemble. The director carefully organizes the symphony of events so that various reactions are possible. The goal is neither anarchy nor rigidity, but extreme flexibility yielding harmonious combinations-a kind of intellectual-sensory kaleidoscope. The technicians and performers control the sensory input (and one works painstakingly on this), but the reception of various mixes of elements is Ieft to the audience . In local-focus, events arestaged so that only a fraction of the audience can see and hear them. During Victims, Choubert went into

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Six Axioms xxxix

stereotyped intensity and stage ma?nerisms. Bu.t on~e a p~rformer lines from the play, intimate speeches that asked for a small circle of accepts the startling premise that pnvacy (of a kind) IS posslble and witnesses and a very low vocal level. At the same time as he was . proper in the theater and that the close relatio~ ~etween ~ perfo~~r.a~d speaking to these few people, another action-on a larger scale-was a very few spectators or even one, is valid artls~cally, wlde posslblhtI~s happening elsewhere. Later, during the bread-stuffing sequence, open. In Dionysus in 69 while Pentheus was belOg made love to by his Nicolas left the central action-which was staged single-focus-and mother (a double mother played by two actresses), members of the went into the audience where he picked a young woman at random and Chorus were circulating among the spectators whispering into their ears, began kissing and fondling her. He went as far as she would allow-on "In ten rninutes we're going to tear him limb-from-limb, will you help several evenings Nicolas found a very permissive partner. He spoke us?" In Commune performers moved among the spectato~s "~rrowing" into her ear private words of lovemaking. He was also Iistening for his clothes and jewelry that became their costumes for the chmactic murder cue, a line by the Detective who continued the central action of stufting scene. A wide range of subtle actions played out at low volume and bread down Coubert's throat. When Nicolas heard his cue, he said to intensity can be used. Real body contact and whispered communicati?n the woman he was kissing, 'Tm glad you agree with me." If the is possible between performer and spect~tor ~n a one-to-one basIs. woman had not been cooperative, Nicolas would say, "I'm sorry you Local whirlpools of action make the theatncal IIne more co~plex and don't agree with me." In either case, spectators nearby this local scene varied than in performances relying on single-focus. Th~ envIronmental laughed. Then Nicolas left the woman and rejoined the central action. theater space becomes like a city where lights are gomg on and off, Local-focus has the advantage of bringing certain scenes very traffic is moving, parts of conversations faintly heard. directly to some members of the audience. A commitrnent on the part of the performer is possible that cannot be gotany other way. But what about the other spectators, those whp can't hear or see what's happening? One may offer them their own local actions or a central action. Or-and NOG used this successfully several times in Victims -nothing else is going on. Spectators out of the range of sight and sound will be aware that something is happening "over there." A few people will move to that place, but most spectators are too timid, too locked into orthodox theater decorum, to move. Some people will begin to look around the environment, see it and other spectators. For those who are neither participating nor trying to participate, the moments of local-focus are breaks in the action when they can recapitulate what has gone on before or simply think their own thoughts. These open moments allow for "selective inattention." Why should an intermission occur all at once? I have found that these pauses-these pools of inattention-surprisingly draw spectators further into the world of the performance. Local-focus may of course be used as part of multi-focus. In this case, certain activities are potentially viewable by all, while other activities are not. In fact, all focus possibilities can be used alone or in combination with each other. It is very hard to get performers to accept local-focus. They are hooked on projecting to everyone in the theater even the most intimate situations and language. They do not understand why the entire Jim Clayburgh's hyperreal environment for The Envelope, a audience should not share these intimacies, these private moments. Or small theater next to The Performing Garage for Terry Curtis they play local-focus scenes as if they were single-focus, with Fox's Cops (1978). (David Behl) ~

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SixAxioms

5. ALL PRODUCTION ELEMENTS SPEAK THEIR OWN LANGUAGE

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This axiom is implicit in the others. Why should the performer ~e any more important than other production elements? Because shelhe IS human? But the other elements were made by people and are operated by them. While discussing the first axiom, I pointed out that technicians should be a creative part of the performance. In environmental theater one element is not submerged for the sake of others. It is even possible that elements will be rehearsed sep~ately, making the performance itself as the arena where cooperatmg or competing elements meet for the first time. 21 • Either all or portions of the performance can be orgamzed so that production elements function "operatically,". all joining ~o make one unified artwork. When this happens, a pyramid of supportmg elements may lift the performers to the apex. But there are other ti~es whe~ the performers may find themselves at the base of the pyramId; and ~Imes when there is no pyramid at all but distinct and sometIm~s contradictory elements. Many multi-focus scenes are structured thlS w~.

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The long dialog between the Detective aso father and C:houbert. as son in Victims was played in near-darkness wlth the Detecttve readmg from an almost hidden lectern at the side of a projection booth and Choubert seated among the spectators, his head in his hands. Their dialog supported two films which .were projected. alternat~ly and sometimes simultaneously on Opposlte walls. The dIalog WhICh held the audience's attention was the one between the films. At other points in the production the performers were treated as mass and volume, color, texture, and movement. Although they were the only performers there, they were not "actors" but parts of the environment.. . The principle of autonomous channels each speakmg ItS own concrete performative language underlies many multimedia shows and some rock-music concerts. The same principle has been important in the development of postmodern dance. Its roots go back to Artaud at least, and have been powerfully expressed in the work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Cage's music is heard while Cunningham's dancers dance. But the dancers aren't dancing to the music, nor is the music supporting the dance. . . Grotowski has carried to the extreme the Idea of competmg elements, contradictory statements. "There must be the~trical contrast," he says. "This can be between any two elements: mUSIC and the actor, the actor and the text, actor and costume, two or more parts of the body (the hands say yes, the legs say no), etc." (Barba 1965: 163).

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6. THE TEXT NEED BE NEITHER THE STARTING POINT NOR THE GOAL OF A PRODUCTION. THERE MA Y BE NO VERBAL TEXT AT ALL. One of theater' s most enduring cliebes is that the play comes first and from it flows all consequent productions. The playwright is the first creator (the author = the authority) and herlhis intentions serve as production guidelines. One may stretch these intentions to the limits of "interpretation" but no further. But things aren't that way. Even in the orthodox theater the play doesn't usually come first. . Plays are produced for all kinds of reasons; rarely because a play exists that "must be done." A producer has or finds money-or needs to take a tax loss; a group of actors want a vehicle; a slot in a season needs to be filled; a theater is available whose size and equipment are suited to certain productions; cultural, national, or social occasions demand performances. One thing is sure-the play is not the thing. Shakespeare's famous sentence ought to be quoted in full: "The play's the thing! Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Certainly Hamlet didn't serve the playwright's intentions, but his own pressing motives. Sanctimonious attitudes toward the text and rehearsals that follow the writer' s intentions-where these can be known, which is not very often-yield litde in terms of satisfying productions. The repertory as performed in most of our theaters most of the time-from Aeschylus to Brecht and beyond-clogs rather than releases creativity. That repertory will not go away. But need it be preserved, expressed, or interpreted? Cage puts it weil: Dur situation as artists is that w~ have all this work that was done before we came along. We have the opportunity to do work now. I would not present things from the past, but I would approach them as materials available, to something else which we are going to do now. One extremely interesting thing that hasn't been done is a collage made from various plays. Let me explain to you why I think of past literature as material rather than as art. There are oOOles of people who are going to think of the past as a museum and be faithful to it, but that's not my attitude. Now as material it can be put together with other things. They could be things that don't connect with art as we conventionally understand it. Ordinary occurrences in a city, or ordinary occurrences in the country, or technological occurrences-things that are now practical simply because techniques have changed. This is altering the nature of music and I'm sure it's altering your theater, say through the

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employment of colored television, or multiple movie projectors, photo-electric devices that will set off relays when an actor moves through a certain area. I would have to analyze theater to see what are the things that make it up in order, when we tater make a synthesis, to let those things come in (1965: 53-54). Cage's attitude-treat the repertory as materials not models-is tied to his high regard for advanced technology. But such a link is not necessary. Grotowski shares many of Cage's views regarding classic texts, while taking an altogether different position on technology. A radical new treatment (some will call it mistreatment) of texts does not depend upon one's attitude toward technology. Grotowski's "poor theater" is precisely a theater without technological help, one strlpped of everything but the performer-spectator relationship. By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theater can exist without make-up, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. 1t cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, "live" communion. This is an ancient theoretical truth, of course, hut when rigorously tested in practice it undermines most of our usual ideas about theater. [... ] No matter how theater expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television (1967: 62).

The opening scene of Jean Genet's The Balcony (1979), designed by Jerry Rojo for The Performing Garage. (David Behl)

The final scene of Jean Genet's The Balcony (1979), designed hy Jerry Rojo for The Performing Garage. The floor of the theater slid open to reveal a basement mausoleum. The spectators crowd around the edge peering in. (David Behl)

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Choosing between Cage and Grotowski is not necessary. Each . production contains its own possibilities, some productions want to be , "poor" others "rich. " What is striking is that men with such diverse attitudes toward technology should stand so close in their I understanding of the text' s function. Cage says the repertory is material, Grotowski practices montage: rearranging, extrapolating, r collating, eJiminating, combining texts. I' These practices f10w from the premises ofAxiom 1. If the theatrical event is a set of related transactions, then the text--once rehearsals begin-wiH participate in these transactions. It is no more reasonable to expect that the text will remain unchanged than that performers wiJJ i not develop their roles. These changes are what rehearsals are for. In ! the orthodox theater these changes often are minor adjustments or they may be rewrites by the author. In environmental theater there may be no principle author, or the texts may be a collage of classics, or a mix from many sources and periods. In such a situation "change" does not precisely describe what happens. Grotowski's confrontation is a more accurate word.

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{Tbe actor1 must not iIlustrate Harnlet, be must meet Hamlet. Tbe actor must give bis cue within the context of bis own experience. And tbe same for the director. [...1 One structures tbe montage so that tbis confrontation can take place. We eliminate those parts of tbe text wbicb bave no importance for us, tbose parts witb wbicb we can neither agree nor disagree. Witbin tbe montage one finds certain words tbat function vis-a-vis our own experiences (1968a: 44). The text is a map with many possible routes; it is also a map that 22 can be redrawn. You push, pull, explore, exploit. You decide where you want to go. Workshops and rehearsals may take you elsewhere. Almost surely you will not go where the playwright intended. Michael Smith, writing in the Village Voice, said this ofNOG's Victims: I don't in sbort, think this was a good p~Oduction of Victims 0/ Duty. It might be described as a very good happening on the same themes as Ionesco's play, using Ionesco's words and structure of action; or as an environment in wbich Victims 0/ Duty was the dominant element. Tbe play was there somewhere [...1 but it was subservierit to, and generally obscured by, tbe formal enterprise of the production. Several episodes were brilIiantly staged, but what came across finally was not the play but the production (1967: 28). Smith's reaction is correct given his attitude. Later in the same review he said,"I do think the text of the play [... ] is 'the first thing, the original impulse, and the final arbiter. '" For environmental theater the

Six Axioms

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play is not necessarily first, there is no original, and those at hand making the production are the final arbiters. This "making of the production" can be reserved for a single auteur, belong to ~ colle~~iv~: or shared with the spectators. The New Orleans Group dld not do Ionesco's play; we "did with it." We confronted it, searched among .its words and themes, built around and tbrough it. And we came out Wlth our own thing.

This is the heart of environmental theater.

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Notes 1.

Michael Kirby, 1965 and 1972, discusses the distinctions between non-matrixed and matrixed performances. See also Kaprow 1968.

2.

For adescription of Self-Service see Kaprow 1968b.

3.

In two books-Encounters (1961) and Behavior in Public Places (1963), Erving Goffman discussed the expectation-obligation network.

4.

5.

6.

A Provo event organized by Abbie Hoffman and James Fourrat was described by John Kifner in The New York Times of 25 August 1967. "Dollar bills thrown by a band of hippies fluttered d?wn ~n the floor of the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, dlSruptlOg the normal hectic trading place. Stockbrokers, clerks, and runners turned and stared at the visitors' gallery. [... ] Some clerks ran to pick up the bills. [... ] James Fourrat, who led the de?Ionstration along with Abbie Hoffman, explained in a hushed VOlce 'It's the death of money.'" To forestall any repetition, the oftkers of the Exchange enclosed the visitors' gallery in bulletproof glass. Since .the writing of "Six Axioms" considerable work has been done 10 the area of "reception theory"-how audiences and readers re.spond to and construct the works presented to them. For ~n ov~rv~ew of these studies see Holub 1984. For particular IOveStlgations of audiences at performances see Hanna 1983 de Marinis 1987, and Schechner 1985: 117-50. ' Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and many perfonnance artists as weil as th~ ~~h-tech of pop music in the MTV era, demonstrate the potentiallties of these "secondary interactions." It could be said that . the period from the mid-70s through the '80s was one dommated by scenography and technical effects. This is true for theater, pop music, TV, and movies. It is less true for dance where the body as such commands attention. .

7.

See Hebdige 1979.

8.

A .complete outIine of these techniques can be found in Jaroslav Fnc' s pamphlet, "Brief Description of the Technical Equipment of the Czechoslovak PaviIion at the Expo '67 WorId Exhibition." In

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1967 Fric was chief of research and engineering for the Prague Scenic Institute. Both the Polyvision and the Diapolyecran were developed from ideas of scenic designer Josef Svoboda. For further examples of Svoboda's work see Svoboda 1966: 141-49 and Bablet 1970. I do not know what happened to this line of work, or these people, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. 9.

An interesting extension of this idea happened during the NOG Victims 0/ Duty. There, for Several scenes, performers ran slide projectors and tape decks. During these scenes the actors were both technicians and role-playing perfonners. They modulated the technical environment in which they were performing.

10. The Hevehe cycle takes from six to twenty years. I discuss it more extensively in "Actuals" (1988: 35-67). See F. E. Williams 1940 for a full account. WiIIiams believes that the cycIe has been abbreviated since the intrusion of Western culture in the Papuan Gulf. It seems to me that the cycIe is meant to incorporate the lifestages of each initiated Orokolo male. During a lifetime each Orokolo male plays, literally, many roles each of them embodied . in the cycle. 11. On two occasions spectators came to Victims intent on disrupting the performance. These attempts were in bad faith: using a mask of spontaneity to conceal planned-in-advance participation. One of these occasions led to a fist fight between a disrupter and another member of the audience who was a friend of mine. The disrupter was thrown out and the show continued with most of the audience unaware that anything unusual had happened. The disrupter's actions and my friend' s reactions both seemed to the rest of the audience to be part of the show. The disrupter was a newspaper critic. Such are the small but real pleasures of environmental theater. 12. "Axioms" was written more than a year before I staged Dionysus in 69. Victims was my first attempt to stage a scripted drama according to the principles of environmental theater. "Axioms" came out of that experience plus my other work with the New Orleans Gr~up and my scholarly research. Dionysus was a continuation of work in the same direction. In it the audience participation was more varied and extreme, the use of space more radical. I have always tried to keep a lively dialog going between

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my practical and theoretical persons. ~uch o~ this dialog relating . mental theater is discussed 10 Envlronmental Theater. to enVlfon d t evidence in . Beyond that, of Victims there is little ocumen. ary existence except a few photos and a short fll.m use? 10 the roduction. A sizable library exis~s concernmg DlOny~us, fnclUding a full-length film made by Bnan de Pairna, Robert Flore, and Bruce Rubin, a book edited by me (Schechner 1970), and William Hunter Shephard's The Dionysus Group, 1991. 13. See my "Negotiations with Environment" in Public Domain (1969: 145-56). Arnold Aronson (1981) traced one possible li~e of.dev~~opment of 14. environmental scenography. In Aronson s Vlew the word environmental is applied to staging that is non-frontal. . d thrust alley and arena stages are all frontal [... ]. Proscemum, en , " . h' h th plete An erformance of which tbis is not true-lD w IC e com mi;/en-scene cannot be totally apprehended by a spectator maintaining a single frontal relationship to the performance-must be considered non-frontal or environmental:' . (1 ~~). Aronson. the~ oes' on to trace "the environmental tradItlo~ from medIe~a ~uro e to contemporary Ramlilas performed 1ß northern IndIa, from ~umming to the avant-garde, from fairs to amusement parks. 15. For a full account of Bauhaus theater works see Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and Molnar 1961. Architectural Record, May 1930. Ideal theaters a~e a hobby of 16. architects. See, for example, The Ideal Elght Concepts (1962). When it comes time to build, the VISIons are scratched and "community" or "cultural" interests take .over. The results ~re lamentable compromises. What most archltects a?d comm~mty planners usually ignore are the needs of actor~, d~sl~ners, wn~ers, and directors. Money talks. See A. H. Reiss s Who BUllds Theatres and Why" (1968).

T?~atre:

For more detailed discussions elaborating on the historical roots of 17. happenings see Kirby 1965 and Kaprow 1966.

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The quest for sources can become, in composer Morton Feldman's 18. t "Mayflowering." As such it is an intriguing but not very game. However, since. I've begun ?laying tJ:te game let me add the Russian Constructivists, the Itahan Futunsts, Dada, and

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Six Axioms

xlix

Surrealism as all important predecessors to modern environmental theater. Traditional performances all around the world have for millennia used environmental theater. 19. In tbis regard it's sad to think about the New York Shakespeare Festival or the A vignon Festival. For the first, a stage has been built in Central Park which does its best to make an outdoor space function Jike an indoor theater. Central Park itself is all but biotted out. When the Festival moves around New York it lugs its incongruent stages and equipment with it rather than negotiating in each locale. At Avignon, the stages buHt around town are imposed on the architecture and natural environment rather than making productive uses of them. Negotiations have not been attempted between the large environments-natural or people-made-and the stages set in or alongside of. The Greeks-see Epidaurusknew how, as do those who stage the Ramlila of Ramnagar in India (see Schechner 1985, 151-212). Lee Breuer (The Tempest) and Peter Brook (Mahabharata) have tried to make creative use of the New York Shakespeare Festival and A vignon spaces. 20. The scenario for Guerrilla War/are was printed in the Village Voice on 7 September 1967, prior to the staging of any of the events. The scenario is reprinted in my Public Domain (1969: 2018). Accounts of the events themselves appeared in the Voice, 2 November 1967, The New York Times, 29 October 1967, and the March 1968 Evergreen. The play I used as the root of Guerrilla War/are was Hed's (Robert Head) Kill Vietcong (1966). 21. Noh drama uses this principle. A noh performance consists in the meeting of several groups of people each of whom train and rehearse independently. The shite (principle actor), chorus, and koken (non performing performer) work as a unit; the waki (second actor), the kyogen (comic actor), the shoulder drummers, hip drummers, stick drummers, and the flutist each work apart from all the others. If noh is done according to tradition, the shite notifies the others that on X date he plans to do such-and-such a play; they each prepare separately. Several days be fore the performance the shire assembles the/ensemble. He outlines his basic interpretation, maybe there is \a' low-key run-through of certain key sc~nes of dances, but there i~ nothing like a full-scale rehearsal. Only at the performance itself does everything come together. This same approach of unity in immediacy arising out of tension applies to other aspects of noh such as basic play structure,

Environmental Theater

organization of a day's prog~am of noh dr.amas, ~tage !?"ehitee~ure, ete. Kunio Komparu ealls thlS "an aesthetle of dlseord (1983.2129).

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SixAxioms

1968a

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22. When I wrote "Axioms" in 1967 I was still several .years away t from enunciating a dear distinction between dramatlc texts and I performance texts. Here I am speaking of dramatic texts, and especially of how the NOG treated Ionesc?'.s Victims oj Duo:. The [ pushing, pulling, exploring, and explOltmg referred to IS the emergence during rehearsals of a performance text. ~

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References

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American Federation of Arts 1962 The Ideal Theatre: Eight Concepts. New York: The American Federation of Arts. Aronson, Arnold 1981 The History and Theory oj Environmental Scenography. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Bablet, Denis 1970 Svoboda. Paris: La Cite. Goffman, Erving 1961 Encounters. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 1963 Behavior in Public Places. Glencoe: The Free Press. Hanna, Judith Lynne , ., . 1983 The Performer-Audience Connection. Austm: Umverslty of Texas Press. _ Hebdige, Dick 1979 Subculture: The Meaning ojStyle. London: Methuen. Holub, Robert C. 1984 Reception Theory. London: Methuen. Kaprow, Allan ' . 1966 Assemblages, Environments, and Happenrngs. New York. Abrams.

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1968b 1983

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"Extensions in Time and Space," interview with Richard Schechner, TDR 12,3: 153-59. Self-Service, TDR 12,3: 160-4. "The Real Expiriment," ArtForum 22, 4 (December): 36-43.

Kirby, Michael "The New Theatre," TDR 10, 2: 23-43. 1965 "On Acting and Not-Acting," TOR 16, 1: 3-15. 1972 Komparu, Kunio 1983 The Noh Theater. New York: Weatherhill; Kyoto: Tankosha. Marinis, Marco de "Dramaturgy ofthe Spectator," TOR 31, 2: 100-14. 1987 Reiss, Alvin H. 1968 "Who Builds Theatres and Why," TOR 12,3: 75-92. Schechner, Richard 1969 Public Domain. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 1970 ed. Dionysus in 69 by'The Performance Group. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 1973 Environmental Theater. New York: Hawthorn. 1985 Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1988 Performance Theory. New York and London: Routledge. Shephard, William Hunter 1991 The Dionysus Group. New York: Peter Lang. Svoboda, Josef 1966 "Laterna Magika" TOR 11,1: 141-9. _ Williams, F. E. 1940 The Drama oj the Orokolo. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ranevskaya's house in act one of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1983) in the outdoor theater on the National School ofDrama Repertory, India. The production environment was designed by Nissar Allana. (Nissar Allana)

Strolling through the--orchard in act two of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1983). The orchard was planted several hundred feet from the house. The production environment was designed by Nissar Allana. (Nissar Allana)

Tbis earth is my body. The sky is my body. Tbe seasons are my body. The water is my body too. Tbe world is just as big as my body. Do not think I am just in the east, west, south, or north. I am aIl over. KilIer-of-Enemies, Apache Hero

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Not every place was good to sit or be on. Within the confines of the porch there was one spot that was unique, a post where I could be at my very best. It was my task to distinguish it from all the other places. The general pattern was that I had to "feel" aIl the possible spots that were accessible until I could determine without doubt which was the right one. Carlos Castaneda

1 Space In June, 1970, I spent nearly three hours in the anechoic chamber at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After aperiod of very deep sleep, I awoke with no sense of how big the room was. I could see the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, but that wasn't enough to fix distance, and therefore size. How big was I? How big were the things in the room? When I spoke or shouted, there was no echo. I discovered how much I depended on echo to fix distance and how much I depended on distance to fix size. I crawled across the floor. It was like a big inner-spring mattress with no cloth covering. I measured the space with my body, but I had no assurance that, like Alice in Wonderland. I hadn't changed size. Then I lay still, and I heard gurglings in my stomaeh, my heartbeat, and an incredibly loud whirring and ringing in my ears. I feIt my body try to expand to fill the space of the chamber, and I experienced my skin as a thin bag containing bones and a lot of sloshing fluid. The fullness of space, the endless ways space can be transfonned, articulated, animated-that is the basis of environmentaI theater design. It '- is also the source of environmental theater performer training. If the audience is one medium in which the I

Environmental Theater

2

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performance takes place, the living space is another. The living space includes all the space in the theater, not just what is called the stage. I believe there are actual relationships between the· body and the spaces the body moves through. Much of workshop and rehearsal is devoted to discovering these relationships, which are subtle and ever-shifting. The first scenic principle of environmental theater is to create and use whole spaces. Literally spheres of spaces, spaces within spaces, spaces which contain, or envelop, or relate, or touch all the areas where the audience is and/or the performers perform. All the spaces are actively involved in all the aspects of the performance. If some spaces are used just for performing, this is not due to apredetermination of convention or architecture but because the particular production being worked on needs space organized that way. And the theater itself is part of larger environments outside the theater. These larger out-of-the-theater spaces are the life of the city; and also temporal-historical spaces -modalities of time/space. At the start of the Open Theater's Terminal:

"We come upon the dying to call upon the·dead." We tried many routes to call up the dead: we invented some, and we studied procedures used by people who believe in invocation. What we chose finally was to knock on the door of the dead by tapping with the feet on the floor, the door of the dead. There is no ground where underfoot-below the wood, below the stone-are not the bones of someone who on ce lived. The guides invited the dead below the stage floor to come through and speak through the dying. l There is no dead space, nor any end to space. The Performing Garage is roughly fifty feet by thirty-five feet, with a height of twenty feet. Photograph 1 shows the environment for Dionysus in 69 during the preperformance warmups. One of the two dominant towers is partially visible. The space is organized around a central area marked by black rubber mats. The audience sits on the platforms or on the carpeted floor. The only concentration of audience is a five-tier vertical structure on the north wall, which seats about one hundred persons. The lower levels of this tier can be seen in the upper left corner of the photo. Photograph 2 shows one of the dominant towers of the Dionysus environment. Pentheus, with his foot on the rai!, is at the top of the 1

Chaikin (1972), 30.

Photograph 1. Preperformance warm ups for Dionysus in 69. Performers stretch out on their backs for breathing exercises. Warmups take about one half hour. (Frederick Eberstadt)

Photograph 2. Pentheus addressing the citizens from the top of one of the towers (Raeanne Rubenstein)

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Environmental Theater

tower addressing the audience and the performers. Spectators sit all around Pentheus. Diagonally ac ross from this tower is its twin, separated by the black mats; about fifteen feet separate the towers. The action of Dionysus occurs in several areas and in several ways. Dominant actions such as the birth of Dionysus, the seduction of Pentheus, and the death of Pentheus take place on the black mats. Choric actions such as the taunting of Pentheus by the chorus, the planning of Pentheus' murder by the chorus, and the soliciting of help from the audience take place in various areas around the periphery, mostly among the spectators. Some actions such as the sexual relations between Dionysus and Pentheus and the initial meeting between Cadmus and Tiresias . take place entirelyout of sight of the audience, privately. Underneath the visible environment is a pit 35' by 8' by 8'; two trapdoors allow access to the pit. There are good hiding places underneath some of the platforms back elose to the walls. These "secret" places were used as well as the public places. Most of the action is single-focus, but significant actions take place simultaneously. While Pentheus is trying to make love with a person from the audience, the chorus is whispering to other spectators: "Will you help us kill hirn in ten minutes?" After Pentheus is killed, all the women in the company rush into the audience and simultaneously tell about their part in the murder. At the end of the play, weather permitting, the large overhead garage dOOf-just visible in the upper right hand corner of Photograph l-is opened, and all the performers march out into Wooster Street, often followed by spectators. 2 Pbotograph 3 shows tbe same space reconstructed for Makbeth ( 1969). Here aseries of tightly connected rectangles rise from a central table. On this table mucb of tbe major action of tbe play takes place. But scenes are also acted bigb in the ramparts, back in corners out of sight of most spectators, and in the pit, which is wholly open, making a trencb down the north side of the Garage. The rugs of Dionysus are gone, and the bare wood rises from a cement floor. Unlike the open feeling of tbe Dionysus environment, Makbeth sugg~sted elosed-in spaces, "cabin'd, cribb'd, and confin'd.'~ Pbotograpb 4 shows Lady Makbeth at tbe opening of the play sitting in her place reciting quietly to herself tbe text of Makbeth's fateful letter. _In Dionysus the audience is free to sit anywhere and invited 2 For a complete account of Dionysus in 69 see Tbe Performance Group, 1970. A film of the play taken in tbe Garage is also available.

Photograph 3. Makbeth environment. looking across the table to the stairway down which the audience comes entering the theater from the second floor (Frederick Eberstadt)

Photograph 4. Lady Makbeth as she appears while the audience is entering. Quietly she is reciting the text of Makbeth's letter to her. (Frederick Eberstadt)

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Environmental Theater

to move around the environment. One scene is a dance with the audience. Spectators frequently join in the action at various times du ring a night's performance. In Makbeth the audience is restricted to a thirty-inch rim at the edges of the platforms. Action takes place in front and behind the audience, but not with them. On only one occasion during the run were spectators invited to participate. I told the audience of about fifty who were gathered upstairs before the performance that they should feel free to move around the space, following the action, exploring the complexities of the environment. I warned them that most of the actions were clustered in bunches performed simultaneously, so that following one action meant missing others. I asked them to remove their shoes so that their movements would not unduly disturb the performers. Nevertheless most of the performers feIt that the movement of the audience was a distraction, and the experiment was not repeated. Audience movement is used extensively in The Tooth 0/ Crime. Photograph 5 is of Commune. Here "pueblos" are built in two corners of the Garage; these are connected by a four-foot-wide "road" elevated to eleven feet. The center area is dominated by agentie Wave that rises, falls, rises, and falls. again. Next to the Wave is a tub three feet deep and six feet in diameter. The Wave and tub are used during the performance as many things: boat, sea, land, house, blood, village, beach, yard. The audience sat mostly high in the environment, though on crowded nights a number of persons sat on the floor. There was some audience movement through the space. For one scene aU the audience was asked to sit on the Wave, and most did so. The action shown in Photo 5 is of Clementine leaping off a promontory into the arms of the other performers who then "fly" her around the space. Photograph 6 is a view of the Commune environment from a height of about five feet and looking out through the legs of a spectator sitting above. Most of the views are not obstructed. But more than in Commune or Dionysus spectators have the choice of sitting at the edge of a platform, deep in a pueblo, with other persons, or alone. The spectator can choose his own mode of involving himself withi.n the performance, or remaining detached from it. The audience was offered real choices and the chance to exercise these choices several times throughout the performance. The spectator can change his perspective (high, low, near, far); his relationship to the performance (on top of it, in it, amiddie distance from it, far away from it); his relationship to other spectators (alone, with a few others, with a bunch

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Photograph .5. Commune, looking toward the west pueblos. In the foreground IS the Wave, and at the rear right is the tub. (Frederick Eberstadt)

Photograph 6. Commune, from back in a pueblo. (Elizabeth LeCompte)

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Environmental Theater

of others); whether to be in an open space or in an encIosed space. Surprisingly few spectators took advantage of the opportunities to change places. Even when the performers encouraged moves-such as saying to the audience when everyone was assembled on the Wave, "When you return to your places, perhaps you want to go to a new pi ace to get a different view of the events"-only a small proportion of the spectators went back to places different from where they'd come. Photograph 7 shows a group of spectators assembled in the center of the Wave during the play's final scene. The spectators had previously been invited into the center of the Wave to represent the villagers of My Lai. (This scene has undergone many changes over the years Commune has been in TPG repertory; the play is still being pcrformed and still being changed.) The scene photographed is of an interview between Spalding and several reporters. The character is being asked about his reactions to the murder of his pregnant wife. ' Photograph 8 is of the The Tooth 0/ Crime. The view is from a gallery above the playing areas which are in and around a large houselike structure built entirely from plywood modules. For the first time TPG used a structure that. blocks vision and has no single arenalike central playing space. Spectators move around the viewing gallery or on the floor in order to follow the action of the play. Also there are windows cut in the environment so that scenes can be seen framed in the environment-giving a filmlike shifting focus to the action. The patterns of movement in Tooth are irregular circles on the floor, with a lot of cIimbing into the modules. Each of the characters has a station in the environment; the characters move but often return to their stations. Some of the feel ofTooth's action is of a medieval play. The Tooth environment is modular. Each of the plywood sides is perforated so that it can be joined to other sides in a variety of ways. Squares, rectangles, polygons, and near-drcles can be built. Low, medium, and high platforms or towers rising to sixteen feet as in Tooth are possible. The modules can be reconstructed in numberless variations. The entire system is non... mechanical: It can be entirely reconstructed by hand. Jerry N. Rojo designed this modular system because TPG needed flexibility in order to stage a number of works in repertory. I will not be discussing The Tooth 0/ Crime except in Chapter 7, because we are still in an early stage of working on it. Rojo, in collaboration with the Group, designed all the environments for TPG discussed in this book. He is, in my opinion, the

Photograph 7. Spectators and performers together in the final scene of Commune (Frederick Eberstadt)

Phötograph 8. The Tooth 0/ Crime environment, looking from the gallery to the center structure. Performers on four levels. The audience follows the action on foot around the theater from scene to scene. (Frederick Eberstadt)

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Environmental Theater Space

world's leading environmentalist. A large portion of his genius is in solving all the formidable artistic-technical problems we put to him in requiring a flexible, transformational space without the encumbrance of heavy or expensive machinery. I met Rojo at Tulane University where he came in September, 1966, on aleave of absence from the University of Connecticut. He had his master's from Tulane and came back to work for his doctorate. The New Orleans Group was working on Victims 01 Duty. I was teaching a seminar in performance theory. Paul Epstein, Arthur Wagner, and Rojo were among those who attended the seminar. We had before us some of the work of Jerzy Grotowski, Happenings, examples of ritual theater, and game theory-of both the mathematical kind and Eric Berne's. Wagner was teaohing acting, Epstein was a musician, Rojo a designer. I recall nothing specific about the seminar, but I know it acted on my ideas strongly. I remember that Rojo said Httle. Over the year we got to be friends. He was the one "technical person" at Tulane who was interested in my ideas. Then when we were finishing rehearsals for Victims, we ran into some technical problems. We wanted a pile of chairs spiraling from the floor to the ceiling strong enough for Choubert to climb on. I asked Rojo to come down to the studio theater of Le Petit Tbeatre de Vieux Carre where Victims was being staged. He liked the environment very much. He solved the problem of the chairs by building an armature of very strong plastic-coated wires from which the chairs blossomed like tree leaves. The next year in New York TPG was in the middle stages of Dionysus rehearsals. Mike Kirby had drawn some towers that I thought would be a good central image for the environment. But Mike wanted towers of a certain shape placed in a certain way; and I wanted something else. I phoned Rojo at Connecticut, and he said he'd help. He made new designs for the towers. I liked them immensely. He went ahead and built the towers. So that is Rojo with hammer and saw. I think my deepest respect for him comes because he knows that environmental design = construction. The ideas are okay, the renderings beautiful, the models exciting-but it all comes down to hammers, nails, materials, and making the space into the shapes you need. I think it's the same with performing. The daily physical commitment is what counts. The spirit is the body at work. After Dionysus I invited Rojo to design Makbeth. I also asked Brooks McNamara who, like Rojo, had been a student at Tulane.

11

Ouring the winter of 1968-1969 they both worked on designs

tha~ ~anged from Ziggurats to mazes to cattle runs. Finally, both ROJo s. and McNamara's ideas were used. Then I asked Rojo to desIgn Commune. Then he designed The Tooth 0/ Crime. I

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T?ese .eight photographs give some indication of the flexibility possIble ~n a small space such as the Garage. Each environment has a dIfferent fee~, tho~gh all are made from simple wood stI1!ctures. The audlence IS arranged in different ways and the actIo~ flows through the spaces differently for each production. In DlOnysus there are many circular movements centered around the black ma~s; the flow is basically uninterrupted and with few turbulen~ eddIes: In Makbeth the moves are angular, there are many pnvate actlOns, I?uch simultaneity, sharp, disjointed gestures, and harsh sounds commg from several directions at once. Heights were used much more than in Dionysus. Commune returns to some of the circularity of Dio?ysus, but the circles are incomplete, broken off. Most of the actIon takes place in the center area on or ~ear the Wave. Tooth flows in tight eddies, circles, and fi~re elghts: and the characters often spy on each other from helghts or hldden vantage points. Each ~nviron~ent g.rew from detailed work with the performers. Work wlth ROJo begms after the work with the performers is wel.I unde~ way. I try to make the environment a function of the actIons dIscovered by the performers. Of course a reciprocity develops between space and idea, movement and characterization. In the case of Makbeth the fact that so much of the rehearsing was done in Yugoslavia far from the Garage led to a production style that bampered the performance. ~nvironmental design comes from daily work on the play. The envIronment develo~s from workshops, discussions, drawings, and ~odels. ~odels are Important because no two-dimensional renderlOg .can glv~ an accurate feel of space. Rehearsals are held in p~rtIally. fimshed environments because the performers' work wIll ~evIse the p~ans even during the construction phase. After opemng, the enVIronment changes as new aspects of the work ar~ uncovered. The Performance Group's work with both the DlOnysus and Commune environments was superior to work with the Makbeth environment because many rehearsals open and cIosed, were held in the partially completed enviro~ments. The space and the performance developed together. On the other hand, th.e G.roup returned from Yugoslavia to a totally finished, extraordmanly strong Makbeth environment-a marriage between

12

Environmental Theater

the environment and the performance was never consummated. Work on an environment may begin long before a play has been selected or a script assembled. The basic work of TPG is with space: finding it, relating to it, negotiating with it, articulating it. 3 Whenever the Group arrives somewhere to perform, the first exercises put people in touch with the space. Move through the spaee, explore it in different ways. Feel it, look at it, speak to it, rub it, listen to it, make sounds with it, play musie with it, embraee it, smell it, liek it, ete. Let the spaee do things to you: embraee you, hold you, move you, push you around, lift you up, erush you, ete. Let sounds eome out of you in relation to the spaee-to its volumes, rhythms, textures, materials. Walk through the spaee, run, roll, somersault, swim, fty.4 Call to another person with words, with names, with unworded sounds, with unsounded breathing. Listen to the ealJs, try them from different places. Then find a place where you feel most safe. Examine this place earefully, make it your horne. Call from this plaee, this horne, this nest. Then find a place where you feel most threatened. Call from there. Move from the bad place to the good place while singing softly.

Space

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An exercise based on these assumptions was developed by the Group at the start of a summer residency at the University of Rhode Island in 1971.

1. Performers move slowly toward each other until they are compressed into a living ball. They pack themselves together more and more tightly until there is no room. They collapse toward no space, toward infinite inward press ure.

I believe there is an actual, living relationship between the spaces of the body and the spaces the body moves through; that human living tissue does not abruptly stop at the skin. Exercises with space are built on the assumption that human beings and space are both alive. The exercises offer means by which people communicate with space and r with each other through space; ways of locating centers of energy and boundaries, areas of interpenetration, exchange, and isolation, "auras" and "lines of energy." 11 3 Articulating aspace means letting the space have its say. Looking at a space and exploring it not as a means of doing what you want to do in it, but of uncovering what the space is, how it is constructed, what its various rhythms are. Maybe staying still in it, as in the spaces of some cathedrals. 4 When an action is literally impossible--such as swimming or ftyingthe performer does it sonically, or in action with the help of others. If a person cannot fty by himself, he can be carried in such a way that he gets a sense of ftying. If he cannot swim through air, he can make his breath find the rhythms of swimming. 5 Much work needs to be done in pinpointing the exact relationships between the human body and space. Many apparently mystical concepts will,

2. Then, an explosion of the primal mass into the space; an explosion with sound. Ideally the primal mass is at the center of the I think, be found to have roots in fact. Just as the blind bat sees with highfrequency sound, so the human being bas many ways of Iocating bimself in space; me ans other than seeing and sounding. I believe that energy is broadcast and received very precisely and that we are at the threshold of understanding what and how. Also we are on the verge of conceding that there is no such thing as dead space or empty space.

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Environmental Theater

Space

space, equidistant from walls, ceiling, and floor-so that the explosion goes in all directions.

3. Each person comes to rest in a place where he feels safe, centered, defined in relation to space and the others. From this center each person marks out· his boundaries, finds the points where he confronts others, where there are contes ted spaces, where he harmoniously shares space. The space is structured by fields of personal energies.



4. Each performer determines for hirnself a route through the space. He keeps this map to hirnself, and once it is set, it cannot be changed. The reason for this rigidity is so that the experience of one performer does not cause another performer to later alter his route, his own experience. Of course the exercise can be done with people choosing maps on the moment. The map of performer A is shown above.

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5. Performer A passes through many different energy fields. Sometimes he is drawn in, sometimes pushed away, sometimes torn between two or more currents. As A makes his way, the others react with sounds, movements (without displacing the feet), and breathing rhythms. A moves either fast or slow, depending on the energies he feels; he makes sounds or remains silent. This exercise with its allusions to the "big bang" theory of universal creation and to the voyage horne of Ulysses through seas of temptations, dangers, and pleasures gives performers a sense of how jull space iso The problem is identifying the constantly changing patterns of energy that radiate through spaces-energy that comes from people, from things, from the shapes of the space. Exercises like the two described help performers make spacemaps-read space in many different ways. Western thought accustoms us to treat space visually. But acoustic, thermal, tactile, olfactory, and brain-wave maps can also be drawn. An olfactory map, for example, will not have the sharp edges of a visual map -it will be fluid, always changing, literally drifting on the wind, with eddies and intense centers shading off toward ill-defined edges. In the spring of 1969 TPG explored the relationship between the snout-the nose and mouth, the cavities of the sinuses and throat-the gut, and the larger spaces in the theater to the large gut spaces in the body. The work culminated with an exercise in June: Everyone in a circle. In the center a basket covered with a white cloth. After two minutes of silence the cloth is taken

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Environmental Theater

away. The basket is full of peaches, strawberries, bananas, cherries, grapes, and blueberries. Everyone concentrate on the froit. Imagine biting into it, tasting it, smelling it. Then, one at a time, performers go to the basket and using only the snout take one grape or berry. Roll it around your mouth, under your tongue; play with it as long as you can. Then bite into it, feel its juices and ftavor, chew it as slowly as you can. Swallow. One performer goes back to the basket, takes a berry or grape with his snout. This piece of froit is passed around the cirele from mouth to mouth. Everyone goes to the basket and with your snouts, making as many trips as necessary, bring back a pile of froit for yourself. Then put as many berries and grapes in your mouth as you can keep count of. When you lose count of how many you have, bite. Let the juices ron down your chin. Sit quietly. Look at the basket. Everyone at once, animal-like, making sounds, using only snouts, rosh to the basket and take the froit. Carry it to a safe pi ace and eat. Find each other. Clean each other with your tongues, catstyle. Relax, make sounds,- take each other in. Take in the whole scene: empty basket, white cloth, stained elothing, scatterings of froit-Ieavings. This exercise took about three hours. The lighting in the Garage was a spotlight on the basket of froit and scattered lowintensity lights elsewhere. The Dionysus environment was standing, and the soft rogs helped the exercise. 1 recaIl the fierceness with which people took the fruit and devoured it. Then they rushed from the center of the theater to dens, perches, nests, lairs. Only after a long while did they return to the open. Through a process 1 don't understand but accept, the insides 01 the body perceive space directly. This visceral space-sense is activated by exercises like the fruit-eating. Exercises in smelling also activate the visceral space-sense. Visceral perception is related to the actual wash of the guts inside the body. To get at this you have to let go of sight, hearing, and touching with the skin. Things must be tasted and smeIled, touched with the nostrils, mouth, lips, tongue, anus, and genitals: those places where the viscerais on or close to the surface. Visceral space-sense is not about edges, boundaries, outlines; it is about volumes, mass, and rhythm. The exercise in which a performer moves through spaces energized by others is about boundaries. "Fruit-eating" is about rhythm.

Space

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I can't draw aIl this material into a neat bundle because I don't have a theory that can handle it. But let me throw a few more things at you. Richard Gould says that Australian aborigines perceive landmarks as "nothing less than the bodies of the totemic beings, or items connected with them, transformed ... into individual waterholes, trees, sandhills, ridges, and other physiographie features, as weIl as into rock alignments and sacred rock-piles." 6 This is very much like what S. Giedion finds in the prehistoric art of tbe caves: One could give an almost endless list of instances showing how forms of animals, imbued with mystic significance, were born out of the rock: the bison in La Mouth (Dordogne), where the whole outline of the back, and to a certain extent even of the head, had been formed by the natural rock; the bison of the cavern of EI Castillo (Santander), where major parts of the body had been seen in a stalactite and only a few lines were necessary to bring out the image; the group of polychrome bison on the ceiling of the cavern of Alta ira, whose unusual recumbent positions stern from the fon of the rock protuberances. . . . Rock, animal, and outline 10rm an inseparable unit. 1 Or the things Antonin Artaud saw in Mexico: Nature has wished to express itself over a race's entire geographie compass. . . . I was able to grasp that I was not dealing with sculpted forms but with a specific play of light, which combined itself with the outline of the rocks .... And I saw that all the rocks had the shape of women's busts on which two breasts were perfectiy outlined.8 Artaud also saw heads, torsos in agony, crucifixions, men on horses, huge phalluses, and other images impressed on tbe rocks or rising from them. "I saw a11 these forms became reality, little by little, in accordance with their rule." In a11 these cases not only is the separation between man and his environment transcended, but each is the image of tbe other. A recurrent claim of shamans is that they can take tbeir guts out, wash them, and replace them; or that they have had their corruptible human guts replaced by etemally durable ones of stone. 8 Gould

(1969), 128. Giedion (1962, Vol. 1),22. 8 Artaud (1965), 94-96. 1

Environmental Theater

18

The visceral space-sense is elusive, even for those who have experienced it. It is a communication from within the spaces of the body to within the spaces of the place one is in. You become aware of your body as a system of volumes, areas, and rhythms; as a coordinated collection of chambers, channe1s, solids, fluids, and gases; as a combination of resilient, hard, inner skeleton covered and held together by supple, tensile muscles and membranes-all this supporting and surrounding central, pulsating, life-source bays, gulfs, and bundles of mobile guts. Donald M. Kaplan has carried these ideas to the point where he believes all theater architecture is an expression of infant body-states. He thinks that the proscenium is a perfected form wherein the digestive guts seated in the darkened auditorium hungrily await the "food" chewed and fed from the brilliantly illuminated stage (mouth). "The interface of stage and auditorium is not acelebration of a maturational achievement, as certain other architectural forms are. A theater reminds us of a dynamic condition." 11 This condition is the digestive tract from mouth to stomach. Thus, as the theatre fills up and the performers prepare to go on, a voracity in the auditorium is about to be shaped and regulated from the stage by an active exercise of so me kind of prescribed skill. At this point, we can begin to answer the question of what a theatre does kinesthetically, by observing that its geometrics and functions favor a juxtaposition of a visceral and executive experience. 10 The visceral audience awaits satisfaction from the actors who feed the performance to them. By putting everyone on stage, so to speak, the environmental theater does away with the dichotomy Kaplan identifies. The audience in environmental theater must look to itself, as weIl as to the performers, for satisfaction of visceral needs. This less sharply delineated division of roIes, actions, and spaces leads not to deeper involvement, not to a feeling of being swept away by the action-the bottomiess empathy enhanced by darkness, distance, solitude-in-a-crowd, and regressive, cushioned comfort of a proscenium theater-but to a kind of in-and-out experience; a sometimes dizzyingly rapid alternation of empathy and distance. The orthodox theater-goer is snuggled. He can keep his reacKaplan (1968), 113. 10 Kaplan (1968), 117-108.

9

Space . 19 ~ions

to hims;lf, and he is more likely to get utterly wrapped up the expenence on stage. This is even truer in the movies where the~e is absolute1y no responsibility to res pond, becaus~ the actors In a film are not present at the theater. In the environ?Iental. theater the lighting and arrangement of space make it lmposs!ble to look at an action without seeing other spectators who vlsually, at least, are part of the performance. Nor is it possible to avoid a knowledge that for the others you are part of the performance. And insofar as performing means taking on the executive function, every spectator is forced into that to some degree by the architecture of environmental theater. . Spectators experience great extremes-of deep, perhaps active mvolvement and participation; then critical distancing, looking at the performance, the theater, the other spectators as if from very far away. Sometimes a spectator will freak out, go so far into the experience that he is lost inside it. More than a few times I have talked someone back from very far places. But the other extreme also occurs. I have spent many hours watching performances from a detached, disinterested point of view; and I have seen others do likewise. This is not a question of boredom, but of focusing on aspects of the performance other than the narrative, or the feelings of the performers. These aspects-technical, environmental, spectator behavior-are masked in the orthodox theater. You couldn't focus on them if you wanted to. In environmental theater there are endless degrees of attention, subtle gradations of involvement. The experience of being a spectator, if you let yourself get into it, is not smooth but rollerco aster. Many people, trained in the rigid reaction program of orthodox theater, are embarrassed by what they feel at environmental theater. They think that the in-and-out re action is "wrong" or an indication that the play "doesn't work." People come up to me and say, "I couldn't keep my attention focused on the play." Or, "I was moved by some of it, but I kept thinking my own thoughts. Sometimes I lost track of what was going on." Or, "Sometimes I feIt good, but at other times I feIt threatened." Or, "You know, I watched the audience so much I lost part of the play." Or even, "I fell asleep." I think all of these responses are splendid. In

If the body is one source of environmental theater design, there are also historical and cultural sources. The body gives data for space-senses while historicalor cultural studies give data for

20

Environmental Theater

space-fields. Modern European-American culture is prejudiced in favor of rectangular, hard-edged spaces with clear boundaries and definite senses of right and left, up and down. There is only a blurry idea of what happens inside these boundaries. We fight wars to preserve boundaries, while letting the life inside our nations deteriorate. Space may be organized without a single axis, as among the Eskimo where figures in the same field are "upside down" relative to eaeh other. Give an Eskimo child a paper to draw on, and he will fi11 up one side and continue to draw on the other side with no more thought of discontinuity than you have when you fo11ow a sentence in this book from one page to the next. Spaee may be organized with a distorted or permutated axis as in surrealist art or topographie mathematics. Or it may be organized according to the X-ray teehnique of the Northwest Coast Indians who see the inside and outside of an objeet with equal c1arity-a eow with her unborn calf in her belly, a fish with a hook Iodged in its throat, a man with his heart beating in his ehest. Space ean be organized aeeording to time, so that sequenee in spaee = progression in time, as in Egyptian panels, medieval tryptichs, and the settings for morality plays in wh ich the progress of history from the Creation to the Fall to the Crucifixion to Salvation or Hell was plain to all who had eyes to see. Spaee ean be organized so that size, not distance, indicates importance. In Egyptian art the gods are biggest, the pharaohs next, and so on through many classes until we reaeh tiny slaves. Examples are without limit. Space ean be shaped to suit any need. The eoncept of space-field may be easier to grasp if I briefty present five kinds of performance space-fields: Egyptian, Greek, Balinese, Mexiean, and New Guinean. The first two are historieal, and the last three exist today. The Egyptians staged periodic eeremonial spectacles. For these they built entire cities and ftoated great, ornate barges down the Nile. The river was not only the liquid, ftowing stage for much of the Heb-Sed; it was itself the souree of an Egyptian -life, a living participant in the great drama of renewal. Time itself was stopped for the Heb-Sed festival. (We retain this idea of a holiday being time out.) The days of the Heb-Sed were not part of the calendar. The function of the mighty festival was to renewall of Egypt starting with the pharaoh. He hirnself played the major role in the drama. "It was not a mere eommemoration of the

Space

. 21

king's accession. It was a true renewal of kingly poteney." 11 The theater event was performed in a special pi ace that existed in a special time. But through this specialness ftowed the eternal Nile which was both sacred and profane. And like the Nile, everyday Egyptian life was transformed by the Heb-Sed and renewed. Special time

Nile Special Nife

i

Via Crete and other Mediterranean stepping-stones the Greeks took much from the Egyptians including the idea that the theater is a festival: something that exists at a special time in a special place. But the Greeks were also inftueneed by prehistoric shamanistic ceremonies coming down from eentral Asia and Europe. Animism, nature worship, and landscape were very important to the Greeks who, in this regard, were not so far from today's aborigines. The Greek theater raised its audienee in a semicirc1e around a full-circ1e dancing area. The audienee area was made from a natural hill, and every Greek theater gives a beautiful view over the skene to the landscape beyond. Thus the Greek arrangement inc1uded elements of holiday (= time out) and eontinuity with the landscape and the gods who dwelt therein. Natural l a n Q .r dscape ~ - '-'

.

r

Naturallandscape

Audience

~

:e

~~ Dance circle

Furthermore, the Greeks liked watehing the dances not as discreet moves but as completed sequences, finished figures-a kind of stepped-out destiny in movement. In some surviving Greek theaters there are pavements of different-colored stones tracing the dance routes: architectural scripts. These pavements help the memo ries of dancers and speetators aIike. At any given moment 11

Frankfort (1948), 79.

Environmental Theater

22

Space

the whole dance is known, and the dancers are seen as figures somewhere on the course. We tried for something like this in the Commune environment where different maps, figures, routes, and writing were marked on the floor and other parts of the environment. We used masking tape because that suggests the police reconstructing a crime and a stage manager marking the floor of a theater. Nothing could be further from the Egyptian and Greek uses of space than the Balinese. The Balinese build nothing special for theater. They do no seasonal plays. They perform in the village square, on temple steps, in courtyards , or on temporary stages thrown up for the occasion. And the occasion may be a marriage, a birth, a stroke of good fortune, a Hindu holiday, a need to placate the gods, or the means by which a rieh man shows how rich he iso The performers are magnificently costumed and trained; they are professional in every sense except the commerciaI. But there is little formality surrounding a performance. Dogs eat some of the ceremonial food signaling the gods' acceptance of the offering, children play in the street in the midst of tbe trance-dancers, old men doze on their porches, women market, and those who· want to watch the play do.

frozen in time. But at the beginning tbese gestures were not strange. SOI?etimes a ritual drama can absorb the wbole attention and energIe~ ~f a ~own without calling for any special construction. The ex~stIng vdlage remains intact, but it is transfonned by the drama Into another time and place. Recently such a drama has been uncovered in coastal mountains of western Mexico. Tbe Cor~ o~ Mesa ?el Nayar were converted to Catbolicism by tbe Jesuits In the sixteenth century. Then in 1767 the Jesuits were expelIed from Mexico. No priest appeared on the Mesa until 1969. During the two hundred years without contact these Cora maintained many Roman Catholic rites, among them a Holy Week passion play. . But they had mad~ the~ uniquely their own. For example, they had come to Identlfy Our Lord Jesus Christ with their ancient deity Tayau, the sun god. . . . They took elements from the story of Christ's Passion, death, and Resurrection and made them into a ceremony apparently designed to ensure the renewal and continuity of their communal life. 13

'( I

Theater in Bali accompanies everyday life. There is no time out for theater. To the Balinese theater happens anytime, anywhere, and its gestures are continuous with the rest of living. This integration of ceremonial and everyday is present in many Oriental cultures. M. C. Richards describes the Japanese Raku Ware where a person makes a teacup, fires it, and drinks out of it "all in a single rhythm." 12 The high formality of J apanese theater is a refinement of daily, courtly, and military gestures. There is no break between theater and the rest of life-only increasingly delicate stages of refinement. The Japanese theater seems alien even to Japanese, because its gestures have been 12

Richards (1970), 29.

' 23

In. the Cora playaboy of about seven plays Christ. There is no Ptlate, no Judas. The villains are called borrados which rneans "erased one~" i!1 Spanish. The borrados are the Jude~ns responsible for the crucIfixlOn. For the three days of tbe festival "all authority civil and religious: passes to a man called tbe Captain of th~ Judeans. He ~nd bIS borrados-young men of the region-darken them~e.lves wlth ~oot and mud and thus 'erase' their own perSOna~ItIes and thetr personal responsibility for wbatever they do." F~:mified with peyote, the borrados hold forth for three days and m~hts. The crucifixion is preceded by achase tb rough the town WIt~ the boy-Christ doing bis best to get away from the borrados. H~ IS helped by a wooden cross that he brandishes. "Three times -In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost-the borrados chased the boy, and three times they fell writhing to t~e ground ~t the. sight of the cross." Then they catch hirn, tie hIrn, and brIng hIrn. to tbe church. There women groom hirn, and he sleeps overmght. The next morning he is brought out by the borrados and made to stand in front of a cross in the churchyard. This is the crucifixion. The next day at noon 13 GuilIermo E. Aldana's extraordinary National Geographie article (June 1971), "Mesa del Nay~r's Strange Holy Week," has many unforgettabl~

photographs.

All

quotahons are from Aldana's article.

24

Environmental Theater

the village governor arrives on horseback. He plays the ~ole of the centurion. He rides among the borrados and breaks thelr bamboo spears. They fall dead to the ground and then get up, go to the stream, and take a purifying bath. "Near the church all· was mirth and happiness." Many things are interesting about the Cora play: how it is integrated into the life of the village,. the changes made in the traditional Christ story, the double quahty of drama and initiation ritual. The Central Highlands of New Guinea provides t~e fifth model of using space. Catherine Berndt observed an all-mght ceremony and noted the changes that oecurred in a large open field. 14 "At first there were district clusters of dancers, although the edges of the clusters blur as people greet kin, attend to ovens, or rest on the sidelines." The blurring eontinues leading to whoiesale intermingling "until it beeomes impossible to di~tingll:ish groups. Nevertheless, a eertain nucleus is likely to resIst thls tendency to disperse." Finally, as the time to set off for horne approaehes, "the various units reform (though less eompactIy then before) and set off."

..

-6~.O~ og~t •

~

0 ••

~

Time 1: Arrival and Performances Time 3: Regrouping and Departure Time 2: Mixing and Performances

This is not unlike what happens at party-except that in New Guinea the gathering is the occasion for performances of farces, dances, and songs. These are ornately costumed and often carefully staged. " . .. " Is the New Guinea use of space more prImitIve than the Egyptian? The New Gu!nea use sui~s New ~uinea. ceremo~ial events which are also mformal soclal gathenngs hke partles. 14

Quotations and drawings trom Berndt (1959).

Space

2S

The Egyptian use suits the great formality and impressive seale of the Heb-Sed. What the environmentalist learns in studying these examples-and many others-is that space-time-aetion is a single, flexible unit. The first obstacle to environmental design is preconception. The great enemy of preconception is a knowledge of cultures and periods other than one's own. Thus far I've spoken of environmental design abstractly. I've said that it is related to body spaces, space-senses, and spacefields, but I have not been concrete in showing how. For one thing environmental design practice is ahead of theory. This is true partly because there are so many extraordinary examples of environmental design if we simply open our eyes to see. Wh ether the environmentalist looks at American Indian, Asian, Oceanic, African, Siberian, or Eskimo societies, he finds many models that may stimulate his creativity. Also he can look back in his tory as far as he can-to Altamira and the other caves; and then forward to Egypt, the Near and Middle East, Asia, and medieval Europe. In our own day he ean study productions like Ludovico Ronconi's Orlando Furioso, Gilbert Moses' and Archie Shepp's Slave Ship (designed by Eugene Lee), Peter Brook's Tempest and Orghast, the work of Jerzy Grotowski, and the extraordinary work of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater. What all of these works past and present, dramatic and ritual, in industrial and nonindustrial societies have in common is that they each create or use whole space. Whether it is Orghast or Robert Wilson's KA MOUNTAIN and GUARDenia TERRACE set amid the ruins of Persepolis and the mountains ne ar Shiraz, or the Heb-Sed on the Nile, or an initiation rite that starts in a village, moves to a road leading to the river, climaxes along the riverbanks, and concludes back in the village, or Akropolis with its environment being buHt out of stove pipes during the performance, or a pig-kill and dance at Kurumugl in New Guinea-each example is of an event whose expression in space is a compiete statement of what the event iso Sometimes the space is broken into many spaces. Sometimes the audience is given a special place to watch from. Sometimes the space is treated fluidly, changing during the performance. Sometimes nothing is done to the space. The thing about environmental theater space is not just a matter of how you end ur using space. It is an attitude. Start with all the space there j: and then decide what to use, what not 10 use, and how to USI what you use.

26

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I

Environmental Theater

Work on Makbeth began in October, 1968, with workshops exploring Shakespeare's Macbeth. We did a lot of exercises about prophesy, Iaying on hands, witchcraft. We took the text apart and reassembled it in funny ways. We tried to find the main threads of action from both an individual and a group point of view. In December we had Rojo and McNamara down to the Garage. Both of them sat in on workshops and talk._Many models of the environment were proposed. We selected, finally, Rojo's -but did not discard McNamara's. After modification it became the Makbeth Maze: the way into the theater from the second floor of the Garage. The Maze was a bit of Madame Toussaud, a bit of fun house, scraps of theater history, mirrors, and information about the performance. It ended at an open hole in the floor, a narrow descent into Makbeth's hell. 15 The mise-en-scene for Makbeth was worked out in six phases, the environment in five.

I

M ise-en-scene

1

1. October, 1968-February, 1969. Improvisations without keeping to Shakespeare's text. Search for basic actions, basic movement patterns. First determination of space-field as "cabin'd, cribb'd, and confin'd." 2. March-June, 1969. Making of scenes not in Shakespeare. These expressed some actual situations in the Group. Using Shakespeare's text as raw material. Demystifying Shakespeare. First character groupings: Dark Powers, Founders, Doers, Avengers. 3. July-August, 1969. Cast assignments. Decisions about the shape of the space, the nature of the music. Much work with Rojo and Epstein. End of group workshops. I worked alone assembling wh at vve had into a coherent script. 4. September, 1969. Rehearsals in Baocic, Yugoslavia, whiIe Rojo buiIt the environment in the Garage. Composition of music by Epstein in Philadelphia. 5. October-November, 1969. Rehearsals in the Garage. 15

The New Orleans Group had something similar in the lobby for

Victims 0/ Duty in 1967. The exhibit was mounted on bill boards and con-

tained hundreds of photos, newspaper articles, letters, birth certificates, and _other personal crap deaIing with the private Jives of the performers and directors-a takeoff on the trivia in theater programs. Also there was a short film, slides, and taped music counterpointing the Tulane NROTC band with HitIer marches. During the performance the exhibit was changed so that when the audience 1eft, people were forced to duck under a sheet on which was written the famous Eichmann quotation: "I am a victim of the actions of others and obedience to duty." From the ceiling hung pietures of Eichmann all neat in his uniform.

....

Space

27

Revis!on of script. Integration of music into the production. Opemng. 6. December, 1969-January, 1970. Run. Few changes except tightening. Closing. The second phase of work didn't yield an acceptable performance text, but it gave performers a handle on the language. The wor~ overcame the scared feelings people have when first approachmg sacred Shakespeare. Also the second phase made it clear how to organize the story and divide the roles. Environment

1: October, 1968-February, 1969. ROjo, McNamara, and I dlscussed the themes of the play and possibilities for the environment. They came to a few workshops. 2. March-May, 1969. Rojo and McNamara attended Wednesday night workshops devoted to text construction and environment. Drawings and models, many rejected ideas incIuding ziggurats, corrals, and wire fences. Finally, Rojo's design is accepted, and McNamara's is transformed into the Maze. 3.. !une-August, 1969. Construction of working models. DeclslOn to move Maze upstairs and use it as the way into the environment downstairs. Approval of final building plans before my departure for Yugoslavia in August. Also approval of costumes. 4. September, 1969. Construction of about 90 percent of the environment whiIe the Group rehearsed in Yugoslavia. 5. October, 1969. Completion of environment, lighting, costumes. The big mi stake with Makbeth was that we rehearsed it in Baocic, and the space-field of that outdoor meadow stayed with uso It was impossible to work effectively in the Garage environment. The Yugoslavian rehearsals broke in two our work on the play; and yet the rehearsals in Yugoslavia gave us tbe fundamental scenic actions. Tbe production could not survive tbe contradiction. Ultimately the magnificent Garage environment was alien to a mise-en-scene worked out in Yugoslavia. The Baocic meadow was Iarge; performers looked across at adversaries who could be seen but not heard. There was a limitless ceiling of sky, the play of natural light, the sweet smell of clean air. In the meadow the Dark Powers transformed into birds hiding in the trees or woodchucks in the underbrush. The Makbeths lived atop a knoll near a large tree. Malcolm and

Environmental Theater

Maeduff, after the murder of their father, Duncan, took a long semicircular route through forests and shrubs to get at the Makbeths. I directed by running from one side of the meadow to another, ducking behind trees or r?cks, ~attened ?n my be~ly in the grass, watching, yelling directIOns, Just keepm~ up v.:lth the action. I saw Banquo, trapped by the Dark Powers m a blInd alley of shrubbery, vainly struggle before they bashed her head in with a rock. I hid nearby as the Dark Powers lured ~akbeth into a dusky gully cut by a brook and whispered to hirn that he would never be slain by a man of woman born. I watched as Malcolm and Macduff, assisted by the Dark Powers, camou~aged themselves with grass and branches and advanced on Dunsmane. Only a few of these scenes were translatable into the Garage environment. The long, deep pit against the north wall served weIl as the gully-horne of the Dark Powers; Banquo was trap~ed amid the wood columns supporting the environment; the adva~cmg Malcolm and Macduff darted from column to colu~n as m a forest as they approached Dunsinane. But the a~phtude ~f the Baocic meadow could not be stuffed into ROJo s ~agmfice~t Garage environment. Furthermore, this amplitude dld not SUlt the play we started the previous winter in New Y?rk. . What happened during the month'~ rehearsa~s m Baoclc was that the performers developed the action accordi~g to the spacefield tbere while Rojo buHt from what he percelved from workshops. Tbe space-field of Baocie eontradieted the sra~e-field. of Rojo's environment. Disunity within the Group made It Impossible to overeome or live with this eontradiction. yve could not use it ereatively. I remember William Finley saymg, when he first saw tbe Garage, "11's great, really marvelous, b.ut how do we work in it?" I panicked and resorted to bloc~mg. Instead of taking tbe time to let the performers feel ~belr way around, tbrough and into the spaee, I imposed actIons .and rhytbms. Throughout its run Makbeth never feIt at borne in the. Garage. I hope I've learned the lesson: Text, action, and environment .' must develop together. Rojo's environment had one supreme qua~lty: It mcorporated tbe tensions he sensed in the Group, confhcts that led to the dissolution of TPG early in 1970. The rehe~rsals of Makbeth coincided with the undoing of the Group. DaIly, heavy personal things came down. and although no one said so out loud, I think we each knew that Makbeth was our l~st play ~ogether. Because of the way TPG works, our confllcts fed mto the structure of Makbeth. It became an angry play of blood, power

Space

29

struggles, betrayals, fleeting eontaets, brief ßashes of quiet punetuated by sereams. All of this is in Shakespeare's seript. It also ebaraeterized the environment. Gone were the soft carpets and suffused lighting of Dionysus replaeed by a concrete fioor, bare wood platforms framed by iron piping, lighting that eame in fitful bursts. Tbe bare feet of Dionysus gave way to boxing shoes, nakedness to unisex costumes of crushed corduroy. It was better with Commune. Rojo and I met during the spring of 1970 to talk over the play while it was in its very early stages. He visited New Paltz several times during the summer to watch workshops and present and revise bis drawings and models. Sculptor Robert Adzema made several models that were helpful in getting the environment together. Everyone in the Group went over the models and made suggestions. At the end of July the Wave was bullt in New Paltz, and we rehearsed with it for the rest of the summer. We appropriated scafIolding and buHt an approximation of the environment Rojo was designing. He saw enough rebearsals to change his plans aceording to what was happening to the play. There were weekly open rehearsals to see bow tbe audience reacted to the environment. By the end of August a plan was agreed on, and during September wbile TPG and Wave were in residenee at Goddard, Rojo built about one third of tbe environment in the Garage. In October we did a few open rehearsals in the Garage working in the partially finished environment. Rojo Iearned from watching us work. He eompieted the environment in October while tbe Group was on tour-still with tbe Wave, our cumbersome environmental security blanket. When the Group returned to New York in November, everyone pitcbed in to paint, the Garage. We painted the ceiling sky blue and tbe walls desert red-brown. The environment was finished. Later, during performances, speetators-given ehaIk-added much interesting graffiti. Some of the graffiti is still on the ceiling, even for The Tooth 01 Crime. And lumber, fittings, scraps of every environment ever built in the Garage comprise part of whatever is most eurrent. This is not only a matter of economy. Like new eities built on the rubble and from the rubble of older ones, the present recapitulates and transforms the past: There is a. tangible tradition in the Garage. There is no such thing as a standard environmental design. A standard design mocks the basic principle: The event, the performers, the environmentalist, the director, and the audience interacting with each other in aspace (or spaces) determine the

30

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Environmental Theater

environment. Having said that, I offer a "standard environmental design." A theater ought to offer to each spectator t1;Ie chance to find his own place. There ought to be jumping-olJ places where spectators can physically enter the performance; there ought to be regular places where spectators can arrange t?emselves r.n0re or less as they would in an orthodox theater-thls helps reheve the anxieties some people feel when ente ring an environmental theater; there ought to be vantage points where people can get out of the way of the main action and look at it with detachment; there ought to be pinnacles, dens, and hutches: extreme places far up, far back, and deep down where spectators can dangle or burrow or vanish. At most levels there ought to be places where peo~le can be alone, be together with one or two others, or be wlth a fairly large group. Spaces ought to be open enough so that in most of them people can stand, sit, lean, or He down as the mood directs. Spaces ought to open to each other so that spectators can see each other and move from one place to another. The overall feel of the theater ought to be of a place where choices can be made. The feel I get from a sucecssful environment is that of aglobai space, a microcosm, with flow, contact, and interaction. This long list of "ought to be's" is oblitt;rated by the specific needs of a production. None of the TPG environments meets all of these "requirements." As the environmentalist works, particularly if he is new at the game, he should ask himself questions. These questions ar~ implicit in the work, different from questions an orthodox deSigner might ask.

1. Does the mass, volume, and rhythm of the whole environment express the play? Not the playas I abstractIy conceive it, but as I have watched it develop in rehearsals? 2. Does the material out of which the environment is built-texture weight, color, density, feel-express the play? 3. Can sp;ctators see each other? Can they hide from each other? Can they stand, sit, lean, lie down? Can they be alone, in sm all groups, in larger groups? 4. Are there places to look down on most of the action, to look across at it, to look up to it? 5.Where are the places for performing? How are they connected to each other? How many pI aces are used both by the audience and by the performers? 6. Are there efficient ways of moving up and down as weIl as in all horizontal directions?

........

Space

31

7. What does the environment sound Iike? How does it smell? 8. Can every surface and supporting member safely hold as many people as can crowd onto it? Are there at least two ways in and out of every space?

i.

The thing about safety is that nothing should be disguised. If a ladder is hard to climb, make it look like it's hard to dimb. In five years working in the Garage there have been no major accidents and only a few scrapes and sprains. The worst that's happened has been a broken foot that occurred to William Shephard when he made a spectacular leap changing his course in midair to avoid demolishing a spectator. The environmentalist is not trying to create the illusion of a place; he wants to create a functioning space. This space will be used by many different kinds of people, not only the performers. The stage designer is often concerned with effect: how does it look from the house? The environmentalist is concerned with structure and use: how does it work? Often the stage designer's set is used from a distance-don't touch this, don't stand on that-but everything the environmentalist builds must work. Stage designing is two-dimensional, a kind of propped-up painting. Environmental design is strictly three-dimensionaI. If it's there, it's got to work. This leads to sparseness. Have you ever thought how stupid the proscenium theater is architecturally? Start with the auditorium, the "house." A silly name for row after row of regularly arranged seats-little properties that spectators; rent for a few hours. Nothing here of the freedom of arrangement in a house where people live-and can push the furniture around. And most of the places in the "house" are disadvantageous for seeing or hearing. The first few rows are so elose that the actors-in their effort to project to the back and up to the balconies-spit all over you; the seats to the side give a fun-house mirror view of the stage, all pulled out of proportion; the seats at the back of"the orchestra under the balcony are cIaustrophobic and acoustically murder; the view from the second balcony makes the stage look like a flea circus. Only a few seats in the orchestra, mezzanine, and first balcony offer anything like a pleasing view of the stage. But this is no surprise. The proscenium theater was originally designed to em. phasize differences in dass and wealth. It was meant to have very good seats, medium seats, poor seats, and very bad seats.

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Environmental Theater

When people come late or leave early, they all but step on you, push their asses in your face, and disrupt whole rows of spec~at~rs. There is no chance to readjust your body, take a seventh-mmng stretch, or extend your arms. During intermission every~n~ ru~s . to the lobby to gobble food, drink, smoke, talk. IntermiSSion IS just about the only human thing going on. Also, of ~ourse, to see who's here-which undeniably is one of theater's chlefest and oldest joys. Not just to look at or for famous. people-.but t.o look over the crowd, see who's out with you thlS evemng. ThlS looking is impossible in the darkened house that cruelly makes you focus straight ahead, as in church or at school, at a performance that finally, may not interest you at all. The worst 'thing about the "house" is that it imprisons you away from the stage where there are many interesting things to see if you were only allowed. What's visible of the stage from the house is only a fraction of its total area and volume. For me the wonderful direction is up. To gaze up into the flies throu~h rods and curtains and lights and ropes and catwalks and gallen~s into the immense space! Whenever TPG is asked to perform m a proscenium, I accept with enthusiasm. "Bring everyone on stage," I say, "and turn a few lights upward so that people can see how high the flies are." Also in newer· theaters there are vast chambers to the left and right of the playing stage, and often behind the playing area, too. These are for "wagons," ~ term as old as medieval theater, meaning rolling platforms on w~lch whole sets are built and then brought into place. And sometlmes there is a turntabIe-a device Brecht loved. Usually there are trapdoors leading to a cellar under the stage, and doors going to the backstage, the shop, the dressing rooms, the greenroom. So ~e proscenium stage is a focused space surrounded on every slde by other spaces attending on the ~tage like an. old queen. How mean that audiences should be extled from thlS royal realm of magie. Such exdusion is pitiabIe, chea~, unfair, and unnece~sary. My own preference is to do away wlth ~ost of the D?-a~hmerr· It makes the theater worker like a soldler trapped mSlde his burning tank. But I would keep the spaces-the overs, unders, and arounds. Some new theaters designed by people who want to keep up to date try to keep "the best" from previous ages. These theaters are like old trees weighted down by so many branches that they break. Such a theater is the brand-new job at the University of Rhode !sland, where TPG was in residence in the summer of

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1971. The theater wasn't even open to the public when I saw it. In the semicircular arrangement of seats in the house is the Greek amphitheater, in the vomitoria leading from the house to the foot of the orchestra pit is the Roman stadium, in the space for wagons are the medieval moralities and pageants, in the fty system are the Italian scenic conventions of the Renaissance, in the slightly thrust stage is the Elizabethan theater, in the proscenium posts is the eighteenth-century theater, in the orchestra pit is the nineteenth-century opera, in the turntable is the early twentieth-century, in the bank after bank of computerized lighting controls are contemporary electronics. Pity the poor student actor! When the Group took one look at this monster, we decided to work in the scene shop--an honest, large, irregular space that could be made into anything. Not by building scenery or pushing buttons, but by putting down a plywood Boor we could dance and run and jump on, some scaffolds to dimb over, a few velours to soak up extra noise, and fewer than twenty lights to make it bright enough to see. The rest is performing. The simple fact that in most theaters actors enter through their own door at one time and audience enters through another door at a later time architectura11y expresses a strong aesthetic and dass consciousness .. The separate doors are entrances literally to different worlds.· The stage door leads to all the equipment and facilities backstage. This stuff is not at a11 dressed up; Layers of paint, raw pipes, old scenery, costume racks, lights, wires, tools, are all laid out in ways that facilitate use and accessibility. Except on the stage things are arranged according to systems that make for easy indexing and use. On the stage, of course, things are arranged for the audience's eyes. The audience enters the theater door into a plush, often ornate, and stylish lobby. This is so even off off-Broadway where, in their own way, the lobbies are modish. The house itself is as plush as the producers can afford to make it. From the house the audience views the stage where an illusion has been created. From the front the stage presents its false but pretty face. From backstage the scenery is ugly (if you like illusions) but working-supports, nails, ropes, and wires are visible-and the view of the stage from behind or the sides reminds me of nothing so mucb as a ship: a lot of equipment focused in a small space. What if the audience and tbe actors were to enter through tbe

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Photographs 9 and 10. Taking Dionysus out into Wooster Streetexploding the space of the theater (Frederick Eberstadt)

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same door at the same time? What if aU the equipment of tbe theater, however arranged, were available to public view at aU times? Wh at if we eliminated tbe distinctions between backstage and on stage, house and stage, stage door and theater door? No theater that I know of has done this, not absolutely. Once in Vancouver in August, 1972, TPG experimented with a "real-time" performance of Commune. I announced to our workshop and to some university c1asses that anyone would be we1come to come to the theater at 6 P .M.-at the time of the performers' caU. About ten students showed up, and they ente red the theater together with the performers. The visitors were free to go wherever they pleased. They watched warmups, listened to notes, belped the tech director check the lights, set the pro ps, fiU the tub, clean up the theater. They watched the performers put on their costumes and saw the regular audience arrive at 7:45. Then the performance. After, the routine of c10sing up the theater for the night: removing costumes and putting them in the laundry bag for washing, re-collecting props, emptying the tub, and all the other routines of ending. Out of the ten students only two or three stuck for the whole process that was over about 10:30. (Commune itself takes only about ninety minutes.) The performers were a little uneasy at their presence for warmups and notes. After the performance no one minded who was there. I feIt funny, too, and performed a Httle for the "real-time" audience. Iwanted them to have a good time. Removing the "magie" from theater won't be easy. A further experiment in this Une is part of The Tooth 01 Crime production. Performers man the box office, greet spectators as they enter the theater, explain aspects of the production: particularly the fact that spectators can get as close to a scene as they wish by moving throughout the theater du ring the entire performance. At intermission performers prepare and seIl coffee, talk to spectators, socialize, and let everyone know when the second act is beginning. The difference between show time and intermission is clear, but there is no attempt made at hiding the non-performing life performers lead even in the midst of a night at theater. Strikingly enough, I find that the performers' concentration on their work and the audience's interest in the story is not at aU diminished by the socializing. If anything, the playing of the play is enhanced. Roles are seen as emerging from a fun constellation of activities that include economics, logistics, hostings, and one-to-

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one relationships. The performers are seen not as the magie peopie of the story but as the people who play the story. When I design an environment, I try to take into account the space-senses of the performers, of the. text-actio~, and o~ the space we're working in. These make an uregular cuc1e, an mterconnected system that is always changing. Text-action

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p"lo,m~

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, In time the space gets set as the environment is built. Or doesn't get set. The finest thing about